Here’s a real cool freeware that I’ve used to make short demonstrations and tutorials: Wink*. Macromedia (Adobe) launched Captivate a while back which is a really powerful tool for making tutorials or even quizzes but Wink is freeware with pretty functional for the everyday user!

Here’s some of Wink’s cool features:

• Small installation – The installer download’s 2.7 MB. It consumes around 9 MB post-installation.
• Resizable capture area – You can choose the region to capture and you can customize its size.
• Captures mouse and key cursors – Captures mouse pointer and key cursor movements pretty accurately. You can even modify cursor positions during editing.
• Hotkey operated – Start and stop captures with keystrokes.
• SWF export – Export your final output to Flash (SWF) format which you could post online. You can also export it with a standalone EXE presentation.
• Add titles and labels on frames – Be a bit more descriptive of you
• Audio recording – Add a little voice-over to clearly explain the process.

A word of advice though, I tried doing a fairly long capture once and it froze on me. I’d recommend doing a series of short segments instead of trying to build a long tutorial. It’d save you on rendering time too since you only need to render a few frames at a time.

So if you’re too tired teaching computer newbies in the family, try this one out. I’d even recommend it for product and software demos.

*For Windows 98/ME/2000/XP Download it here.