Have you ever been on a support call with a vendor who is clicking away while you’re jotting down notes about what they are doing?  Ideally you’d want to stop them at each step and make sure you’ve got all the details down, but you really don’t have time to prolong this any call any more than absolutely necessary.  This recently happened to me during a remote, beta software install (Arena) with a vendor.  Enter Wink…

Attachment: Wink2.gif (4153 bytes)With DebugMode’s Wink ™ 2.0 you can say goodbye to rushed note taking.  In less than a minute you can set up Wink to record a screencast including the audio (nice if you’ve got the vendor on speakerphone) of the entire session.  Wink has too many excellent features to list here, but a few of my favorite are:

• capture a window, a section of the screen or the entire screen
• snapshots can be taken on a time basis, key/mouse input-driven, or manually
• edit a screencast to add textboxes, notes, navigation buttons, etc.
• renders output to an .swf file (sweet!) or an exe.
• It even has a very decent 36 page user guide

Did I mention Wink is FREEWARE?  The author, Satish Kumar S, has obviously put a lot of time into the software and documentation and based on the copyright it looks like this product is 5-6 years old.  He is to be commended for his hard work and willingness to give this product away for free.

If you want a screencast tool for making user tutorials, recorded presentations, or live note taking and you’re on a shoestring budget or frugal (like me), then I highly recommend you download and try Wink 2.0.