TurboDemo makes it not only easy to create animated demos, the slide view makes it easy to edit the demonstrations. A tool bar makes enhancing individual frames, or slides, quick and easy. The different style text callouts or balloons let you make your demonstrations even more appealing. I found a lot to like about this program, and expect you will, too.
You can see a demo I created in just a few minutes by clicking here.
After recording your screens, you can easily flip back and forth from the individual slide view to the thumbnail view below. This makes it easy to pick out the screen you want to edit. If you have ever used a program like Microsoft's PowerPoint, I think you will agree that this multiple slide view makes it easier to locate and then edit individual slides than navigating with a scroll bar as with Instant-Demo.
When in individual slide view a toolbar makes it easy to add text boxes, pointers and more.
The Professional Edition offers a variety of output options.
One handy feature, especially if you have
a lot of notes in your slideshow is the ability to Export the demo to a text
fie. There are many features in TurboDemo that you may not really discover
right away because the wizard mode make the program so easy to use without even
looking at documentation.
Then standard
edition only allows for saving demonstrations as Flash of gif animations.
This may be fine for many developers, but the professional edition adds several
other formats as well. Now most programs of this nature will allow for saving
demos as Flash format files, but if you spend some time creating demos with more
than a few screenshots these files can become relatively large - and therefore
take longer to load on a web page. Java applets seem to load much quicker
and this is another real plus for TurboDemo.
When you start recording your screens, you can adjust the size of the recording area. See the box below.
I found one feature in Instant Demo that I preferred over Turbo Demo, the Red Square designating the area to capture could be more easily moved and resized than the option shown above in Turbo Demo.
If you have created demos of your program and want to include the same images in your printed documentation you will find the Output Slides to Images a real time saver. This option allows you to extract individual frames from your demo, or create images from all the slides in your demo with several file format options.
Finally, although both TurboDemo and Instant-Demo allow you to choose a screen resolution for recording your demo, Turbo Demo includes an option to Resize your demo. For example if you choose to large a screen resolution, and then look at your demo from another PC you may decide you want to resize all the slides in your project. TurboDemo makes that easy to do, which is just another reason it gets my vote for the best in the category.
The bottom line: TurboDemo is the best option for creating demonstrations of your software. Available in a standard edition for $299 and the Professional Edition at $499, I highly recommend the Professional Edition if for no other reason than the Java applet output option. Visit their web site to learn more about this fine product, as well as their upcoming version 6.0, at http://www.turbodemo.com