Saturday, April 22, 2006
Documentation Tutorials and Presentations
I am a real documentation hound! I love to document. I'm far from being great at it but I do like to do it. I find documentation such an essential part of maintenance and acceptance. If you expect ANYTHING to be purchased, maintained, and accepted, it must contain documentation. When I design an application or a script, I am not satisfied until it is bulletproof... this is a great thing... the problem with having “bulletproof” software is that it breaks so infrequently and when it does... how the internal workings function are a real mystery. I have looked at software of mine from 10 years ago, and other than being shocked at how far I have come since I first wrote it, I am pleased to see the flow, the routines, and even the Bugs have been documented. That fact alone has saved me hours maybe even days of work tracking down any problems.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I think that is true. I am a real fan of diagrams. I love Visio. I wish Linux had something as nice... I know there is Dia and Kivio but they are not even close to the functionality of Visio. Anyway, I digress... If a picture is worth 1000 words then an interactive tutorial must be worth at least 10000 words or 10 diagrams. What format should be used for the interactive tutorial? You want to make it a format that is at the very least crossplatform.
Formats like mpeg, etc. are great movie formats and can really be key in showing a process that is not interactive. Sure it can be used as a HowTo, you see it all the time on DIY shows... but it is not Interactive. It is also not very suited to capturing the computer tutorials. So what is? Flash? ShockWave? Yeah! Thats the ticket! There are quite a few Flash/Shockwave tutorial creation tools available, but one in particular caught my eye... and it FREE! For Personal AND Business usage! AND available for Windows and Linux!
The Cool Pick Of The Day is Wink. You can find it at http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
Wink is a Demonstration creation tool that is oriented towards the creation of Application HowTo Tutorials and Presentations. You can capture screen shots and cursor movement and even add sound. In addition, you can add instructional text inside explanation boxes (called callouts), titles and add navigational widgets such as Forward, Backward and GoTo buttons.
Also Wink allows very nice control of cursor motion. Since Wink separates the cursor events in a separate editor stream, you can hide the cursor, change the cursor, or reposition the cursor in each frame of your tutorial.
Using templates in your design process can give all your tutorials a consistent look and feel. By adding custom background pictures, logos, text, etc to the template, those features will automatically be added to every frame of your presentation which makes for a professional touch.
You can add audio as well (Windows version only). This feature is great. It adds a professional quality to the presentations and can assist the user experience since a user can be listening to the process and following its instructions without having to take up valuable screen real estate.
By utilizing all these features, you can guide a tutorial viewer through complex processes and still give them full control over their learning experience.
One of Wink's strengths is its flexibility. Wink supports a variety of picture formats for input: bmp, jpg, gif, tiff, and png as well as quite a few output options for the presentation such as Macromedia Flash, Standalone EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML or any of the picture input formats. The Flash and html output options are nice when you want to add your presentations to a web site. The standalone .exe format is nice for distributing to Windows users. While not a direct feature of Wink, with a little of your own effort, you could even create an auto play CD and have a "bootable presentation."
Another feature that can be useful is Frame Scaling. This feature allows you to scale your presentation screen size. I would hardly imagine anyone using it to scale a presentation BIGGER but scaling smaller for quick and small presentations on the web maybe quite useful for giving a "Flavor of" presentation- Not alot of details but giving the general idea of what to do. Because screen captures are bit mapped scaling is not a great thing to do. If it is a concern that your presentation is not going to comfortably fit on a screen for a step-by-step presentation, then do the presentation in native resolution (say 800x600) then there would be no need for scaling down to 800x600 from 1024x768 (or higher).
There is plenty of language support too- English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese. This is such a nice feature if you are making multilingual presentations.
Though not a feature of the software, Wink has a good supportive user forum community accessible from the website http://www.debugmode.com/userforums/. This is a nice touch that the developers of Wink have supplied. There are many people on the forum who have created great tutorials and give some great support, as well as, sharing many tips and hints for making better tutorials.
I do highly recommend reading the 36 page manual/tutorial they give you. It explains everything well and has a nice walk-through tutorial. It does an excellent job at explaining the components of Wink and how to use them effectively.
Using Wink
Starting your Demonstration is quite easy. Just choose File>New to create a new project and the New Project Wizard presents you with a few options. At this stage you can: choose to capture Audio; set the screen size to capture, screen region or window; the frame rate; and Input Driven events (mouse and key) to capture. The next step in the Wizard just gives you the Hot Key choices and an option to Cancel or Minimize Wink to the SystemTray.
The hot key choices are:
1) Take a screen snapshot <Pause>
2) To start/stop timed captures <Shift-Pause>
3) To start/stop input-driven captures <Alt-Pause>
After you Minimize to the System Tray, you can press Shift-Pause and go through the motions of the Task you wish to capture. Then press Shift-Pause again. Then double click the Wink Icon in the System Tray and click Finish in the Wink box. Now you are ready for Creation and Editing.
You can take multiple captures and copy and paste them into a project. Then you can add CallOuts and buttons to each frame by using the Properties for Frame box (the Properties Bar).
Because there is no Undo feature, it would be prudent to Save As using the presentation name with a version number or some designation before making major changes or after each stage of presentation completion. Save often and save many staging copies. Then when you are done, delete all the other unneeded presentations.
Conclusion
At the moment, I can only see 2 small draw backs with the software:
1) I could not get a Windows project to load into the Linux version of the software. I think that is because there is a version difference- 1.5 for Linux and 2.0 for Windows. I was able to get a Linux project to load in the Windows version of Wink with no problems. I am not sure when this issue, if ever, will be resolved, but I imagine when the Linux version catches up with the Windows version, the loading problem may be resolved.
2) No sound for the Linux version yet. I hope that too shall be resolved with release 2 of Wink for Linux. Of course you can work around this problem by making your screen captures under Linux and adding sound under the Windows version. :)
