Latest status of Wink - questions for Satish

[svatas]

Dear Satish,

let me pick-up the open questions to you regarding the future of the Wink project. Can you please be so kind and try to go through them and try to answer? I think that a lot was expected (even after Beta program introduced) but nothing real is there. And what is the worst - many years of nearly silence (just check this Discussion group).

Q1 : What is the real status of the project?

Is there any "modern" version to download/grab higher that version 2.0 from http://www.debugmode.com/wink/? Is possible to somehow access the beta from https://winkit.in?

Q2 : There were some "rumours" (also supported by you) that you will soon leave flash support and change it to HTML5. Is there something real behind?

Looks like big community behind Wink and many happy users of your product. I think it is just matter of "organisation" of the group to make it somehow active and also to support you and release new version.

Q3 : If you are unable/do not want to continue in development of Wink, can you somehow "delegate" the code development to somebody? 

I registered some question about opening the code under some Open source licence and you agreed that is is not a problem (at least in the time when this question popup). Do you have any contact to somebody (in case you decided to delegate)?

Q4 : In case you have plan to open the code, do you agree with the organization of some community behind? Do you want to organize and setup it by yourself or it could be done by somebody else?

Still looking to this conference - a lot of people there waiting for any message from you about new version/beta version etc. We are here and maybe we can help. Even to organize some crowfunding campaign. We beleive in your product as it is still unique and professional.

Q5 : We lack any information about you and about your product. Are you still keen on working on Wink?

Looks like there is a group of people which can support you with a lot of effort. The only statement we are missing is from you.

This is nothing against you and I am writing this to know what is behind. There are some personal feelings about Wink and looks like we can somehow help you. But there is now news from you.

So what is your opinion to this topic? Is Wink finally dead project or is there some chance to have it in the near future?

Have a nice day.

Svatopluk Vít

Prague, Czech Republic

Happy Wink user

[Satish]

Dear Svatopluk,

Thanks for asking. My responses inline:

Q1 : What is the real status of the project?

Is there any "modern" version to download/grab higher that version 2.0 from http://www.debugmode.com/wink/? Is possible to somehow access the beta from https://winkit.in?

No one is actively working on the project now. I tried to build a modern version with Wink beta at https://winkit.in, but user feedback indicated they want a desktop application, so that beta was abandoned.

 

Q2 : There were some "rumours" (also supported by you) that you will soon leave flash support and change it to HTML5. Is there something real behind?

Looks like big community behind Wink and many happy users of your product. I think it is just matter of "organisation" of the group to make it somehow active and also to support you and release new version.

Yes, I did create HTML5 support for the above mentioned beta. But it was never built for desktop Wink. Since the web based Wink beta didn't work for users, there goes whatever HTML5 support was built for it.

Q3 : If you are unable/do not want to continue in development of Wink, can you somehow "delegate" the code development to somebody? 

I registered some question about opening the code under some Open source licence and you agreed that is is not a problem (at least in the time when this question popup). Do you have any contact to somebody (in case you decided to delegate)?

This is an interesting idea. I haven't thought much in the past, but if there is a need for a future version of Wink this will be likely how I can support it.

So what is your opinion to this topic? Is Wink finally dead project or is there some chance to have it in the near future?

So I did a survey recently among some Wink users (you may have also received the survey email). From the responses, it looks like there are a ton of screen recorders, tutorial creators and screen casting software currently available - at different price segments. To name a few

• Active Presenter

• Screencast-o-matic

• Camtasia

• Snagit
  

• Camstudio

• ShareX

• Greenshot

• Srecorder

• ISPRING Screen Capture

• Ashampoo

• Picpik

• Screenpresso

• Dlink

• Open Broadcaster + GreenShot

• Snipping tool

• RecordMyDesktop

• XvidCap

• Screen2Gif

• Nono

• Magix16

• Ying and Google slides

• Chrome plugins

• Hypersnap

• Dahu

• Licecap

• Greenshot.  Playmore.

• Panopto

• Windows 7 outil capture

• Atube capture

• FastStone Capture

None of them have the exact same feature set as Wink does, but given that so many of them are out there I don't see any value in continuing development of Wink. I thought the web-based version could be a differentiator, but it was mired with issues and users didn't like it.

So, that's where it stands. I'd be happy to refer Wink users to any of the above software as they are actively maintained. On the other hand, if there are any popular needs that aren't addressed by the above, I could think of working with a 'delegate' to build that.

Cheers

Satish

[Satish]

I'm still thinking about this, but have come around to the idea of replacing Flash support with first class HTML5 support (and timely announcement from Adobe - https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash-dead/). Separately I'll try to find people who can build additional functionality in future and if necessary get paid for those features. That will help keep the project going.

Thanks for starting the discussion Svatopluk.

[svatas]

Dear Satish,

thanks a lot for your answer, everything is much clearer now. Let me describe, why is Wink so unique and therefore the list of available apps is not relevant for me. Believe me - I was trying hard to find anything which could replace Wink but was not possible.

I like the possibility to fully control the animation which will be created - I can work with mouse cursors, popups, waiting for user interaction etc. Good is also the the functionality, which can somehow "add" mouse pointer movement and the presentation looks like real stream. I do not want to create a video file rather than animation - HTML5/Flash/GIF file. GIFs are quite good but there i not possible to add some kind of interactivity for users - even restarting of the animation is not possible. But the resulting file is small and nice for some tutorials.

Therefore I still use Wink but more and more people is asking for something different than Flash...

But back to the topic - is there something I can help you? As I said I am not programmer but maybe there is something which I can help you with. I was a head of local community of some different opensource project. I can help with some documentation, web site preparation etc.

And the last question - can we say, that Wink is going opensource? Under GNU GPL  or some other OSS compatible licence? Then we can advertise this new on some special sites and I think the community will be formed soon (I hope).

[Alexander Geppart]

Hi Satish,

as suggested by svatas, it would be great to have your wink as a public repository with a corresponding licence on github or some similar hoster.

People who are interested in this software could fork your repository and add features to it.

You (or someone else) could than just check that features and accept them or not.

Your software could have a chance to be kept alive.

please think about this option.

for an example see https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus

ps: I like wink and use it a lot. For me the feature "export as PDF" is extremely useful. Here I would like to have an option for quality of the exported pdf.

Kind regards

Alex

[Satish]

Hi all,

Just a quick update - I've started working on Wink again and plan to roll out a 3.0 version in the next few months, with proper HTML/youtube/etc output and Windows 7/10/64bit support. Open source is not in my mind at this time (it's a lot of work unfortunately to open source something like Wink), but my first focus is to revive the project and make it relevant for today's use cases.

If you'd like to stay in touch and give early feedback as development happens, please let me know and I'll reach out at the right time.

Cheers

Satish

[Catherine Bernabe]

Hi SAtish,

thanks for this update. It's a good news that you revive the project. Please let me know when you will release it.

BR

Catherine

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Catherine BERNABE

06 26 10 00 23

[Peter Bowmar]

Amazing, great news! I am happy to alpha/beta test if you need it.

Will you also be supporting Linux or just Windows going forward?

Cheers,

peter B

[Satish]

It's been a long time since I looked at Linux development. Any suggestions on what is the popular distro and ways of distributing apps on Linux are these days?

Cheers

Satish

[Banibrata Dutta]

Satish,

For app distribution look at Snap (https://snapcraft.io/) from Canonical based on container tech, Appimage, Flatpak... those are distro independent formats. For me, at least on Ubuntu snap works very well (given both are from same company), but for Appimage -- while it works 99% of the time, I've had some issues with some software. Have no personal experience with Flatpak.

Happy to be beta tester on Windows 10 enterprise edition and Windows 10 Home.

cheers,

Banibrata

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regards,
Banibrata
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bdutta
http://twitter.com/edgeliving

[Banibrata Dutta]

Here's a comparison of the 3 (but do read the top comment on the accepted answer, where it says that Snap also added theming support).

https://askubuntu.com/questions/866511/what-are-the-differences-between-snaps-appimage-flatpak-and-others

[Peter Bowmar]

Hi Satish,

Appimage I have had good success with, and Flatpak as well but not quite as easy to deal with for casual users.

Professional VFX work tends to be done on Centos 7(or similar) platforms, home use tends to be Ubuntu-ish. So Appimage is a good choice to avoid .deb/.rpm wars :) They can be unpacked easily and installed to companies as well which makes them attractive for pro use too.

I'd recommend developing on Centos 7 with sanity testing on Ubuntu 18.10 and that should cover a large part of the user base.

Cheers,

peter B

[Satish]

Thanks, both. I'll keep this in mind as I start development.

[Jakub Raška]

Hello Satish,

can you please let us know about the progress on Wink 3.0 version? 

Since Firefox is disabling Flash next month and everyone else will do the same during the 2020 we are being pushed to change our Flash tutorials to something else and it would be great to know if we should wait for the new version of Wink or try find an alternative (there is none equal tho). And since Wink is immo the best tool for interactive tutorials a 3.0 version with HTML support would be like a miracle for a lot of people.

Thank you for your amazing work so far.

Jakub

Dne neděle 26. května 2019 3:06:55 UTC+2 Satish napsal(a):

[Satish]

I'm actively working on it now and hope to release an update soon.

- Satish

[Robert Ilbrink]

Thank you so much

Robert Ilbrink

On Sat, 18 Jan 2020 at 23:00, Satish <satish....@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm actively working on it now and hope to release an update soon.

- Satish

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