The problem

You need to make tutorial videos to teach your new colleagues how to work with a certain application. Now you could create training documents and have some long or boring training session to teach them stuff they often don’t get after the training anyways.

The other option would be to just record step-by-step tutorials of your application. Your new colleagues would just copy over some training videos and watch them to see how to use that new software right.

The solution

Exactly for this reason, and probably because of my lazyness, I found a very nice free application called “Wink” coded by Debugmode.

Here’s the description from the official Wink website:

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.

That sounds great, right? It is! You can just download it, install it (Windows or Linux with GTK 2.4 or higher) and create great looking flash videos of how you perform a certain action you want to show to your friends or colleagues. The tool itself has a pretty straight forward user interface which allows you to create a professional looking tutorial video. Either you capture your whole screen, a predefined area or a custom area of your screen.

But you can do much more than just record your desktop. You can add a voice recording to your video, add text comments, draw shapes, add weblinks links, etc. This tool is really advanced when it comes down to features. Also, editing your recording frame by frame can by done easily.

You can download this piece of software goodness by clicking on the Wink logo:

I really hope you’ll enjoy this tool as much as I did :)