I’ve recreated my earlier video guide on using a TiddlyWiki, a single-page wiki you can use for your notes and task lists. Instead of Wink, I used CamStudio to capture screen activities this time.

Wink is an easy to use free software to capture videos of your screen activities and it’s great for creating tutorials. My only problem with it is that it doesn’t offer an option to capture screen activities in video format (i.e. mpeg or avi) so that it can easily be uploaded in video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe, and Revver. Wink outputs the screen activities in .swf and .exe formats.

My previous screencasts– one is on how to turn any web template into a WordPress theme–are in .swf format and hosted in the Internet Archive. I’ve had complaints on its playback quality and how it can be slow at times so I decided to try hosting it other video services. These services, however, do not accept .swf files so I spent days trying one application after another to convert the files into .mpg or .avi formats to no avail.

I gave up on the conversion and instead decided to do the screen capture again, this time using another software. CamStudio, which is also free, is another piece of software that can capture screen activities. What’s great about it is that it offers the option of rendering the video into .avi format. It doesn’t have, however, the editing capabilities of Wink, which allows you to edit by frames. But for my needs, CamStudio is more than sufficient. I first tried it for my short demo on using ActiveCollab to recreate my Wridea blogging workflow.

TiddlyWiki, on the other hand, is a useful piece of software for keeping notes. I’ve extensively used it and its adaptations for months. I’ve been showing it off to people I know and I find that many get taken to it once they see how easy it is to use TiddlyWikis. Here’s the video introduction to TiddlyWikis. I’m still looking for ways to display a bigger version of the tutorial: