Review: DemoCharge 2005

DemoCharge Professional 2005, $149.95
YesSoftware
Las Vegas, Nevada
(888) 241-7338
http://www.yessoftware.com/index2.php

If you've been reading Larkware for a while, you've seen DemoCharge in action: it's the application that I use to capture the little animated movies that grace some of my software reviews. YesSoftware has recently released a minor upgrade to the program, which gives me a good excuse to do a fuller review of it here instead of just linking to it from other reviews.

The basic idea is pretty simple: DemoCharge records what's going on in a window, on your entire screen, or in a particular region. When you're done recording, you can edit what you've captured using a variety of tools. Then you can export the final product to a movie - I'm happy with the animated GIF format myself, but they also support AVI and Flash, with a Java applet capability on tap for a minor upgrade next month. The whole process is quite straightforward; the help file is excellent, but it shouldn't take most users more than a few minutes of noodling around to get the basics down.

The editing tools provide much more flexibility than I need. You can clip frames out or insert ones that you forgot to record, which makes it easy to patch up longer movies without re-recording the whole thing. You can add captions or little balloons. You can edit mouse cursors and mouse movements and fade in or fade out effects. You can create a master frame with content such as a watermark to be displayed throughout the presentation, and you can even manage a soundtrack if you want to get that fancy. I've also not had any problem with it across a fair variety of video cards and systems, and it performs well inside of virtual machines as well as on real hardware.

The pricing structure is worth mentioning too. There's a $99 standard version that doesn't support Flash or audio, which you can get for $49 if you're willing to have your demos co-branded with a little advertising logo in the corner. Otherwise, you can pay the $149 for the full Professional version. There's a 20-day evaluation available for download as well. And yes, I did use DemoCharge to capture its own demo, by running a second copy inside of a VMware virtual machine.

  Click for larger screenshot

  Click for animated movie (630 KB GIF made with DemoCharge 2005)

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.