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Wink - the power of presentations
Posted by felipegaucho on December 19, 2005 at 04:54 AM | Comments (6)
Cejug-Classifieds have become popular these days and several new developers have asked about how to configure their development environment. I first tried the traditional way publishing some documents such as the Reference Guide and posting detailed messages in the developers mailing list. That effort revealed itself weak and many developers remain out of work just because they don't have much time to figure out how to configure the Tomcat, the MySql and mainly the Web Tools for Eclipse. Visiting other projects I noted the usage of demo videos as a powerful way to teach how to do things. Kirill Grouchnikov uses AVI video format [1, 2] and the Solaris team shows some well tailored videos about the OS. Other project and blogs include people in complete audio/vídeo about technology news and installation guidance.
Wink usability: a feature I have liked too much was the ability to create a video based on screenshots instead of a continous action - reducing the video size. It also provided me a chance to choice what screnshot will compose the video and also the chance to remove mistakes in the tool usage. A flaw I couldn´t work around was the absence of persistent text blocks, i.e., I can´t mantain a text box during more than one frame. The tool also gives me the chance to mix screenshots with continous image recording - cool!
I strongly recommend the usage of tutorials in your Open Source project. Presentations and tutorials are faster to produce and reduce communication problems. I know there are more sophisticated commercial softwares to create presentation, but Wink is a free alternative that offers a very good usability.
Aknowledgement: moments before publishing this entry I found a previous post by Vincent Brabant. Brabant first introduced the Wink through an elegant presentation about NetBeans. I will try to use those next button tricks in order to control the rhythm of my next presentations.
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Comments
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I have to say one thing for the real-time AVI content - it's almost painful to watch that slow-motion cursor. It really distracts the attention from the dialogs, since it looks so unnatural.
Posted by: kirillcool on December 19, 2005 at 01:14 PM
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Just to let it clear, Wink is not open source software. There's no access to the sources.
Posted by: flozano on December 20, 2005 at 05:18 AM
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about the mouse slow-motion: you can configure the frames per second in order to create more real time animations. But I don´t have a concrete oppinion about the best format - Wink give us just two choices: .exe or flash animations. I know other tools provide a better output options, but Wink seems the best option for free. If you got any Open Source / freeware suggestion, please let us to know.
flozano: you are right , Wink is not OSS. Sorry if my text suggested that.
btw: do you know any OSS that produce such videos ?
Posted by: felipegaucho on December 20, 2005 at 05:39 AM
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I don't have the links right now, but there are many demos around built using rfbmacro (capture VNC sessions) and swftools (to convert them to Flash). Not so easy as adding your own screenshots but worth the results. OpenOffice.org Impress also can export to PDF and Flash, so this would do your screenshots, with the added value of enabling you to but a fixed text box in all your slides.
Posted by: flozano on December 20, 2005 at 06:12 AM
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Info about other tools are available here : http://www.myscreencast.com/forums/
Posted by: nevster on December 22, 2005 at 06:39 PM
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I just watched the Wink presentation of SDN's "Introducing Design Patterns in XML Schemas". I'm grateful to have discovered this little tool but by golly it's odd how some of the presentation's sections linger while others whiz past at bullet speed.
thanks for this review
Posted by: bentrem on September 15, 2006 at 11:29 AM
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