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Sunday, November 08. 2009


Wink: Making screencast tutorials

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Debugmode Wink is a freeware piece of software for both business as well as personal use for doing screencasts and incorporating sound into your screen captures. The main useful format it outputs to is macromedia flash though you can output to PDF for handouts and so forth. While its not a PostgreSQL related item per se, it can be useful for making all sorts of tutorials including PostgreSQL tutorials that involve showing people how to do things on screen. We've started to experiment with tutorials of this format and hope to get into doing more hands on like tutorials. We'll probably be doing a using PostgreSQL in OpenOffice tutorial in this issue since it lends itself well to screen casting.

Where to get Wink and OS Support

You can get Wink from http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

It comes in two versions. One for Window and one for Linux. Haven't tried the Linux version so can't speak for its merits. From reading it seems the Linux version is a little behind in functionality of the windows one, though hopefully that will change.

Debug mode site has some other interesting video slicing, morphing and framing software also released as freeware.

Wink Features

These are the features of the Windows version 2.0 build

  • Fairly intuitive to use and it comes with flash videos generated with Wink showing how to use Wink.
  • Screen recording and voice recording. We like to do our screens first and then cut in voice afterward, though you can record at the same time
  • The project screen once you have done a recording shows all the frames and you can save as a wink project.
  • You can cut out frames you don't like
  • Add text boxes, cutesy arrows, add next previous pause buttons that stop the movie at that point waiting for user to click next
  • Dub in voice snippets at any frame
  • Render to flash and to keep the size down, it allows you to designate the size of color palette and build the ideal color palette.
  • If you have two or more wink projects you have done, you can copy frames from one to another simply with copy and paste and thus stitch together many screencasts to make a more lengthy video. I'm thinking this is a great feature if you want to cater your tutorials to a specific audience, you make short reels and stitch together ones that are relevant for each group.

Below is a simple link of a screencast we made for PgCon2009 just in case our computer decided to break on us. OpenJump demo This one we didn't have any jazzy sound or other fancy features of Wink. Later tutorials we plan to explore the more advanced features of Wink like sound dubbing and bubble windows and so forth.

Posted by Leo Hsu and Regina Obe in product showcase at 14:17 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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I personally prefer BB Flashback Express. It is completely free and worked very well on all the systems I've used it: http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/bbflashbackexpress/home.aspx
#1 Cd-MaN (Homepage) on 2009-11-09 12:41 (Reply)
What's wrong with plain old video, again?
Noo, we can't use that, it would be JUST TOO COMPATIBLE. We must spread the Flash disease everywhere.
#2 madman on 2009-11-24 01:50 (Reply)
What's wrong with "plain old video"? For example the fact that it doesn't offer any controls (like start / stop / pause / volume controls) by default (just see the plain [video] tag from HTML5). Or the video codec "compatibility" (or utter lack of it). For better or worse, Flash is a de facto standard which works almost everywhere (including Linux).
#3 Cd-MaN (Homepage) on 2009-11-24 03:40 (Reply)
Yeah, these days Flash Mostly Almost Works on non-Windows platforms, if you ignore the occasional rendering quirks. And hey, it even compiles for x86_64!

And WHEN it works, it makes sure to strip you of any privacy, security and features that your browser tries so hard to provide. It makes sure that any web developer touching Flash will very likely screw up because it uses similar, but subtly different, programming practices. And god forbid if your user might want to right click and download the video for later.

But speaking of HTML5, have you actually ever seen a "plain video tag from HTML5"? Adding controls is just 8 keystrokes away, you need to type "controls"! And if you want to support recent browsers (bar IE), you need to add two sources in two different codecs -- just add two elements. The code is still MUCH simpler than a single Flash element (wtf... object? param? embed? and 100 ad hoc attributes that you'll never remember...)

Now obviously I'm overdramatising all of this. Yes, Flash has more market penetration (thank you MSIE!), but if you cater to open source developers then almost anyone will prefer open standards. Unlike your average user, we're happy with [link to download video] if all else fails. If Flash fails, all you get is a crashed browser.
#4 madman on 2009-11-24 12:23 (Reply)

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