The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

A very feature-rich screen capture, demonstration, and learning program is available. This is pretty great and I'll undoubtedly be using it in the near future. It's free for personal use only, but the commercial version has an unlimited evaluation period so ... I don't know what exactly to do with that.

Background: I was looking for a possible freeware alternative to PSR and Imago, which this does provide. Active Presenter has a "smart capture" capability that only captures "when mouse [is] clicked or key pressed. Each action is captured as a slide which explains in details what the viewer/learner should follow to master the lesson."

Sites:
https://atomisystems.com/activepresenter
https://www.ghacks.net/2015/02/24/activ ... r-windows/

Steps: Uniextract, launch ActivePresenter.exe

Status: Not portable. Writes to C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\ActivePresenter (tested version 6.1.3) EDIT: Retested 6.1.6 with the same result.

Just a follow-up to this original post ...

This program is quickly becoming a cornerstone of my work here on the site and elsewhere.

Adware note: This program adds a watermark when exporting to MS Office formats, but it's possible to just make the screen extra large and then crop the watermark. It hasn't been a serious issue.

Some uses:

* HOWTOs and testing: As-you-click screenshots, useful for building
* Create video demonstrations (with narration, animation, zoom/pan, and closed captions)
* Basic PowerPoint alternative - by importing images

The program supposedly can build tests and interactive toolsets but I haven't tested any of that.

Update on this program: a new version came out on Feb 12, 2018, but -- like so many tools of late -- the program is 64-bit only. A 32-bit older version remains available on the download page:

https://atomisystems.com/download/

Update: the new version appears to be liteware, so keeping a copy of the old version handy might be wise.

https://atomisystems.com/activepresente ... omparison/

... but I'm not sure if it's wholly accurate. For example, it seems to have HTML 5 export enabled.

I was holding out hope this would be the case as their HTML 5 demos essentially turn product demonstrations into a series of screenshots. The resulting quality and file size difference is *huge*. The screenshots can be indistinguishable from the original and longer videos (outside of the base browser 500k player tools) can be as much as 20% of the original. It's a big deal.

EDIT: Should also note that the record-as-you-click bit has improved a bit but it's also now being called "Record Software Simulation".