Association for Biology Laboratory Education

WINK IS FREE SOFTWARE WHICH ALLOWS EASY CREATION OF ANIMATED COMPUTER TUTORIALS
 



Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2008, Volume 29

Todd C. Nickle & Robert Hodson

Abstract

A new, free (!) piece of software from DeBugMode called Wink allows for rapid and easy construction of Flash tutorials demonstrating how to use pretty much any computer application. There is a Windows version and one for Linux (untried by these authors). The output can be tweaked to render in Flash, portable document (pdf), or as a self-executing (exe) file. The captured keystrokes can be annotated with "speech bubbles" (callouts) and frames can have audio files added to them. Tracking of the animated mouse is easily modified as well. Although the source files are quite large (for example, 19 Mb), they compress to a much smaller format after creating the finished files (2.2 Mb).

Keywords:  software

University of Kentucky (2007)