How to create a web demo in 5 minutes
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
See the demo without reading the blog entry...There are some software products that are free and, most importantly, useful that don't make it into the limelight list of applications. I.e. Word, et al.
Wink is a "free" utility that allows you to create flash movies of your interaction with your operating system. For us mere mortals, the OS is Windows or Linux or Mac OS X.
You can use Wink to create demos of your products and distribute them via your web site, since the whole demo is actually a flash movie. How many times have you wished you could show someone how to do something, rather than explain it via email or via phone. I guess, now you could.
I wanted to give this tool a try and this
tutorial was borne: a tutorial of how to use the "Recent Posts" section in my web site.
I think the "Recent Posts" section is self explanatory, however, it is not entirely clear as to how blogger has chosen to sort the entries. The default is actually by date. I.e. Most recent entries show on the top (I think that's logical).
Anyway, the point of my "Recent Posts" section tutorial is not the tutorial itself, but the time it took me to build the whole thing: approximately 5 to 10 minutes - And I'm a slow typer.
Why is this tool free?
I guess is one of those application that is good enough for someone to pay for it, however the creator decided not to charge for it.
I mean, how much would you charge for it? It seems so trivial, yet so useful. And if you had Flash Director, you could just build it by hand - But, that would require someone to know how to use flash.
I'm also not quite certain you could build a descent business or a marketing plan around one single niche tool.
Or maybe you could, but can a business be grown into a multi-million dollar empire of Winks distributors? Maybe, maybe not - If we could only get
Steve Jurvetson to invest - I mean, this guy may have invested in Gutenberg's printing press, for all I know :)
Ok, this is a bad .com joke. In case you didn't get it: Jurvetson was the king Midas of the 1990's. Anything he (and his company) invested in went IPO and made him quite wealthy at a very young age - Well, he's not so young any more and he is a bit older than me :)
I guess Wink's creator, by making the tool "free," kind of helps to balance the universe:
give and ye shall receive, I guess...Mind you that my free software is not as useful as Wink. To be fair most of the commercial (and useful) software I write is highly confidential and written under contractual agreements.
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