 After
a long absence "away," I finally had the opportunity to review some software
again. This time, it was Lotus’ ScreenCam product, advertised as "The Only
Show And Tell Software For Windows 95." ScreenCam’s main goal in life is
to perform moving screen captures.
Let me say first off, ScreenCam is not for your ordinary user. As I said earlier, ScreenCam records all actions and movements on a Windows 95 screen similar to the older programs that captured keystrokes and combines that with the concept of the original Dan Bricklan’s Demo program. I selected this package because I like to program and felt this was one of the best ways to develop tutorials. Therefore, I fall into the target audience: application developers. The documentation is **extremely** sparse, only four pages, and two of those in French. In fact, the customer support guide and software licenses are longer (and are spelled out in more languages). Getting back to the documentation…System requirements are spelled out for a 80386-25MHz or better running Windows 95 (a 386 running Windows 95?), but a 486 is recommended; VGA and a 16-color graphics adapter; a mouse; and a sound card with speakers/headphones and a microphone are recommended. If you don’t want to add sound to your presentations, you can skip the sound card and the audio i/o devices. Just for the record, I used a 486 running at 120MHz, a 24-bit VGA video card, a 16-bit sound card, and 36 MB of RAM. Installation was straightforward and presented no problems. The program was provided on three 3.5" disks, so a CD-ROM would’ve been overkill. During the installation, I discovered something from the disks that is not obvious from the package as it was delivered: though the box was labeled as an evaluation copy, the disks (marked in *very* small print) and the installation routine said this version would not be able to save the screen movies. With that in mind, some of the best features were unavailable for testing. Not being able to save meant not being able to combine movie segments, not being able to edit, and not being able to distribute for others to test. In other words, just as I was getting a taste, they jerked the spoon out of my mouth. Had this been on the box, I undoubtedly would never have chosen this package to evaluate. Now that I’ve got that out of the way, here’s what I *was* able to check out. Like most Win95 applications, this one was run from the Start button, giving a VCR-style control panel to begin the recording process. I tried some screen recordings while opening folders, running applications and viewing graphics. System performance under this application was sluggish at best and a JPEG file that normally took about 5 seconds to load took nearly 30. Though I couldn’t save the movies, I could play them back. The playback,
though true, was quite jerky and percentage numbers displayed as graphics
were loaded were irregularly presented. That, added with the playback being
even slower than the original presentation, keeps me from giving this more
than a marginal rating.
On the other hand …The back of the box provides a tantalizing description of the features of the regular package. ScreenCam allows you to make PC movies with sound, movies without sound and sound-only recordings. You can even combine screen-only movies and sound-only recordings later to provide a full demonstration. You’re even supposed to be able to add captions and subtitles when you don’t provide sound.The box also says you can combine up to 20 (yes, 20) segments for a much longer movie. The ability to crop the screen, assign personal hot keys and distribute the final product in other formats to those without the ScreenCam player add up to a potentially powerful tool. If the full package is faster, lives up to the description on the box and has better documentation, this could be a very good program for people who want to distribute tutorials and "how-to’s" along with their regular products. If I get a full package in the future, I’ll be happy to provide an update to my fellow members.
|