Introducing RoboDemo eLearning Edition

by Joel Meier

A review of Silke Fleischer's presentation at the April Chapter Meeting

In just 35 minutes, Silke Fleischer demonstrated how you can easily create tutorials using RoboDemo 4.0. The tool records your movements in any application, or on-screen activity, and then turns those recordings into Macromedia Flash format with visible and audible mouse clicks.

She first demonstrated the speech recognition feature—very nice! She cautions that you do need to use a unidirectional microphone. I can attest to that: I just bought Office Professional and have used the speech recognition feature with a desktop microphone and headset; the headset works better. You can purchase a unidirectional microphone for $8.00 to $35.00.

One thing that I noticed right away was the AutoText captions feature. Silke did not have to write any of the captions—RoboDemo did it all. This feature is a huge timesaving. Once she created a basic tutorial, she added rollovers, images, audio, click-boxes, a few other special effects.

Silke pointed out that each frame of the presentation is a self-contained unit. The video and audio for that frame is editable at the frame level. If you make a mistake, you do not have to start over! Compared to Camtasia, this is a huge plus. I am not an expert Camtasia user, but when I have used it and made a mistake in my presentation, I always have had to start over from the beginning to fix it. Very frustrating.

Here are some other features (the list is from the eHelp website):

• AutoText Captions
  RoboDemo automatically writes and inserts text captions that describe each step taken by the user during the recording session.
• Movie Gallery
  A convenient way for you to showcase a set of RoboDemo movies for easy posting on a Web site or intranet.
• Animated Introductions, Trailers, and Transitions
  Add animated introductions, trailers, and transitions to make tutorials and demos more visually appealing.
• Email Project Files
  Share your RoboDemo project files by email to dramatically simplify and shorten the collaboration and editing process.
• Expiration Date
  Add an expiration date to tutorials and demos containing time-sensitive data to help avoid the circulation of old information.

Other significant features in RoboDemo 4.0 include the ability to quickly edit movies by making universal changes to objects without having to edit frame by frame, and the ability to copy and paste multiple frames and objects multiple times. The new fade feature allows users to create smooth frame transitions, giving RoboDemo movies a more professional look.

Download the free demo and see for yourself how you can quickly create highly interactive Flash-based software demos.

RoboDemo 4.0 list price is $349. RoboDemo eLearning Edition list price is $449. For more information, visit www.eHelp.com, call 800-388-4332 (from within the U.S.), or email robodemopr@ehelp.com.