TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
I've used DemoShield to create software demos of the type you
describe. I think it's very good for the purpose. It's flexible
and easy enough to work with and the demos are very small.
However, we ran into problems using the DemoNow facility
provided by DemoShield to produce demos that run in a Web page
without the need for downloads. It is certainly possible to do
exactly what you want, but due to firewalls, proxy servers,
operating systems, and web browsers, many prospective viewers
(users, clients) will not be able to run the demos.
In tests over our local intranet the DemoNow demos download and
run quite seamlessly if the viewer has Windows and Internet
Explorer. The player downloads, installs itself, and runs the
demo automatically. It is also quite small, about 350K and the
demos themselves are tiny, being mostly compressed bitmaps.
However, Netscape users will have to download spearately, then
run. Mac users can't run demos at all.
Further problems arise with putting the demo on the Internet. We
found that many of our prospective clients will be unable to
view DemoNow demos because of their firewall and proxy server
configuration settings. For most, it would be a case of having
to download a zipped file containing the player, a .dll, and the
demo itself, which they would have to unzip to a folder and run
from there. Same demo, but a lot more hassle. The kind it seems
you want to avoid.
After numerous emails to and from DemoShield support we were
unable to resolve this problem.
Mark
_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
