One of the challenging jobs in maintaining a software like Spybot-S&D is the support work. And the longer one answers support emails, the clearer some repeating questions appear. Those are the ones that find a way into our FAQ and How to sections. If you have visited our How to's in the past, you may have noticed that we tried to explain some repeating tasks with the help of screenshots.But for tasks taking many steps (like the How to update for example), one screenshot still is a bit limited. But instead of making a bunch of screenshots, we decided to look for some animated solutions. I personally don't like websites that use Flash/Shockwave even for menues etc., but to explain some software functions in detail, it gets quite useful.

I had that idea in mind for our new website for quite some time, and shortly after the website launched fate played a demo of TurboDemo into my hands (it was a CD coming with my favorite computer magazine c't). After looking at the existing demos, I decided to give it a try, and create a short demo of the How to update tutorial (243kb).

To my surprise, it didn't take me longer than half an hour to create that example. Creating a new project showed me some help dialogs that introduced me into the most important features instantly. All I had to do was take a bunch of screenshots of a specified area of the screen, sort them (I had taken too much, so I threw some out), and add a few comments. You can see the result here (243kb).

I will now use this tool to create animations for all How To sections, and later a complete first scan tutorial.

Patrick Kolla on January 16th, 2004.