atw: RoboDemo and the like
- From: Craig Hadden <CraigH@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:43:30 +1100
Recently, with news of eHelp being bought by Macromedia
(//www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter/10-2003/msg00109.html), I
downloaded a trial version of eHelp's RoboDemo. (Size: 20 MB. Available, in
exchange for a valid e-mail address, from
http://www.ehelp.com/products/robodemo/downloads.asp).
RoboDemo is a simple but very useful-looking program for quickly creating
demos of Windows software. You might like to take a look at it if you create
demos (e.g. for training, marketing, collaboration) already, or would like
to.
You use RoboDemo to record your actions. What it does is basically take a
screen-shot every time you click on something in your software. Then it
strings the shots together into a "video" complete with smooth, generated
mouse movements and "speech-bubble" captions.
To me, the really neat thing about it is that it can automatically capture
the name of many of the items you click on, such as menus, buttons,
check-boxes and the like. (Reportedly this aspect might not work so well
with programs written in Delphi, though.) Then RoboDemo uses the captured
text to generate editable "speech bubbles" that document what you're doing.
For example, if you recorded a demo of you choosing Tools > Options, then
clicking the "Wrap to window" option and closing the dialog box, RoboDemo
might generate captions that said (to paraphrase):
From the Tools menu, choose the Options command.
The Options dialog box opens.
Click "Wrap to window."
Click OK.
Obviously such generated captions could save you a lot of time.
What I haven't experimented with yet is recording more complex actions such
as selecting text in a document, or dragging things with the mouse, or even
recording a demo of a an online documentation or help system for that matter
(which might be useful for teaching people about your documentation -- see
//www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter/10-2003/msg00094.html). But
RoboDemo seems to be based around Flash, so it might be able to cope with
that sort of more complex animation too. Here's hoping.
I'd be interested to hear what anybody using RoboDemo in a production
environment thinks of it. Likewise, if anybody knows of software that does
the same thing, or even software that does it better, please do speak up.
P.S. Just in case this message looks too much like an ad, I have no
association with eHelp or RoboDemo. My interest stems from a previous job
where I developed computer-based training in Visual Basic, and of course as
a technical writer having to write sometimes tedious steps by hand.
Regards,
Craig
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