This article was written by Pradeep A, a programmer.

Overview: DemoCreator enables users to record screen activity and make powerful, rich and interactive presentations. This software can be used by people spanning a multitude of professions including but not limited to sales, marketing, software, education, IT, etc. The potential users list of DemoCreator can span the entire spectrum of all known industries.

 

Summary of Pros:

 

• * Simple and easy to use
• * Lots of options to customize the presentation
• * Capability to customize the player control bar
• * Capability to add interactive actions in the form of buttons and text entry
• * Exceptional mouse click animations
• * Customization of screen size and aspect ratio
• * Hotkeys support
• * Capability to tag presentations with author information
• * Capability to add company logos and images to presentation
• * Variety of callout options
• * Lots of options to customize the callouts themselves

Content: I created two demos using DemoCreator to conduct this review. The first demo shows how to change the mouse pointer scheme of the computer. The second demo shows how to use a program. The first demo can be treated as a tutorial while the second demo can be treated as a software demo. For the purposes of writing this review I will call the first demo “Mouse Pointer Tutorial” and the second demo “Say Hello Demo”.

 

 

Here is the created demo of "Say Hello Demo", it may need several seconds to load, your patience is appreciated!

Say Hello Demo - Record by Take Screen Shots and Publish as Flash

I started off by selecting to create a new project (in DemoCreator) by Capturing Screenshots. See Figure 1 below.

Figure 1
The next selection I had to make was to select a capture mode. See Figure 2 below.

Figure 2
Capture mode lets you specify whether the full screen or a specific region of screen or a specific application window will be recorded. I chose application window for both the demos.

The next selection to make is the Recording Mode. There are two types of recording modes: “Take screen shots” and “Full Motion Recording”. As the names imply the first one take a series of screen shots to record screen activity while the second one takes a continuous recording of the screen activity. See Figure 3 below.

Figure 3
If “Take screen shots” option is selected the user is allowed to customize a few capture options such as mouse click animations, textual capture instructions, etc. “Full Motion Recording” option does not let you customize these options with the exception of voice narration. See Figure 4 below.

 

Here is the created demo of "Mouse Pointer Tutorial", it may need several seconds to load, your patience is appreciated!

 

Mouse Pointer Tutorial - Record by Full Motion Recording and Publish as AVI

Figure 4
I chose “Take screen shots” for the “Say Hello Demo” and “Full Motion Recording” for the “Mouse Pointer Tutorial”. The next step is to click the “Record” button and record screen activity. Having walked through the steps of creating a demo project it was very obvious how simple and easy it is to create a new project and start making a presentation. In my opinion the first strength of DemoCreator is its user interface which is very simple and easy to use. This 3 step process of creating a presentation is astonishingly simple and easy. More often than not, many applications have a busy interface that may be overkill for achieving the same results. Without a busy interface the look and feel of DemoCreator is very welcoming. Prior to creating the project I changed some settings such as screen size, aspect ratio, player control bar properties, etc. to suit my needs. All of these and many other properties are made available in an easy to use settings screen.

The recording process was a breeze. No issues at all. The hotkeys were useful in the recording process. As I mentioned previously, I recorded two demos in both the available recording modes. After recording the screen activity I opened the project in DemoCreator to customize the demo and to create (publish) the demo. Depending on the recording mode selection either screen shots in the form of slides are shown or a timeline of the recording is shown. This edit mode of DemoCreator allows customizing the recording such as add callouts, images, sounding clips, etc. I customized the “Mouse Pointer Tutorial” by adding my own callouts and mouse click animations by editing the project. See figures below.

 

 

I found it very easy to customize the “Mouse Pointer Tutorial” because all the customization tools were readily available in the same window. It is worth mentioning that customization is not limited to just “Full Motion Recording”. Even “Screen shots recording” can be customized with custom callouts and mouse click animations. In my opinion the powerful and striking feature of DemoCreator is its ability to add interactive actions to the demo. I added an interactive button to the “Say Hello Demo” which requires the user to click it before the demo can continue. This is a good way to pause the presentation to allow the user to read any message in the presentation. This can also serve as a good tool to make the demo interactive by allowing the user perform the actions required in the demo. For instance, in the “Say Hello Demo”, the user has to click a button to continue. This worked like a charm pausing the demo and then restarting when I clicked the button. I published the demo to AVI and flash file format without any problems. There are several other ways to publish the demo including to a CD, and to a LMS format. The LMS format in particular gives the capability to cater to educational institutions to develop learning tutorials as well as to corporations to develop training presentations for the employees. My demo played back without any issues. I was able to set some playback parameters such as the screen size, aspect ratio, image quality, and to have the demo loop all the time. From the time I started the project to the time I published the demo it was fast, easy, simple, stable, and highly performing. There were no performance or stability issues. DemoCreator is a lean, mean, powerful program to create exceptional quality software demos, tutorials, presentations, etc.

Wrap up summary:  Overall, I found DemoCreator to be very rich and powerful in its capabilities to enable me to create superior quality presentations. The greatest strength of this product to me is the ability to add interactive actions to my presentations. Not only can I to create decent demos but also engage the users of my presentations in an interactive manner making it fun and interesting for them. It took me less than a few minutes to create, customize and publish both the demos. I would recommend this program to anyone interested in creating demos in a quick and easy way and still obtain outstanding and professional results.