Do you ever have to give software demos to people that matter? Here are some my of favorite tools.

screen capture movies: Camtasia is a great tool for creating a canned demo that plays like a movie. Not only can you export out in a variety of formats such as Flash, Quicktime, etc., but it is basically a movie editor with a timeline and transitions. Add special effects such as callouts (text in a baloon), etc. I especially like how it generates all the HTML wrappers for a Flash file you can put on a web server, so users can watch the movie via their browser. It’s not free, it’s not cheap, but it does come with a 30-day trial and is worth the money in a corporate setting.

window sizing: Sizer is a neat little utility that is the easiest way to snap a window to a pre-determined size. Need to get a screenshot that you intend to show on a projector that has a resolution of 1024×768? If you don’t get it at the correct size and aspect ratio, it will look fuzzy on the projector. Sizer adds a new function to the right-click options on a menu bar to snap it to your favorite size. It’s a lot better than manually dragging the standard window resizer very carefully until you get the (almost) right height and width. Not only does it work great, it is free.

screen capture: Windows has a built-in screen capture utility. Just press Alt-PrintScreen and the active window will be put onto the clipboard. Then you can go into a graphic tool like Gimp and do a paste (i.e., Paste as New). Press Ctrl-PrintScreen to capture the whole screen to the clipboard. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

image editing: Unless you’ve already got a multi-hundred dollar package like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, you need Gimp. It approaches Photoshop with power, but is free. It has layers, PNG support, third party plugins, etc. I even use it for basic tasks like cropping and resizing. It’s quite mature.

If you have any favorites, please comment.