Useful Non-testing Tools: Part III
As a quality assurance component of an organization, there’s a pretty strong possiblity that you might be called upon to make a presentation of some kind. No, I’m not going to give you some lame tutorial on using Powerpoint. Life is too short. Instead, I’m going to show you some tools to add to your toolbox. Along with Cropper, which I have already showed you, here are some other tools that might help you put together a winning presentation.
ZoomIt (Presentation Tool)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx
click on image to see the video demo of ZoomIT
ZoomIT is a nice tool to use during presentations. You can use it to zoom in and out on your screen, making unreadable items bigger. When zooming in isn’t enough to accentuate an item, you can also draw an arrow or circle an item. Yes, that’s right, ZoomIT makes your screen into your own personal John Madden console, allowing you to make on the fly notes during your presentation. Make a mess of your screen, simply hit “ESC” to clear off the junk. Something else that’s interesting is the timer feature. Need to give your presentation participates a ten minute break? You can start a timer, and it will count off the time in a full screen mode. It’s blatantly clear when everyone needs to return. Watch the video on youTube, try it out. One hint: to see all the commands, right click on the ZoomIT tray icon and click on “options”. But basically, it’s Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, and Ctrl-3 to Zoom in, draw, and start timer respectively.
Windows Media Encoder (video screen capture)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5691ba02-e496-465a-bba9-b2f1182cdf24&displaylang=en
How did I record the above video for ZoomIT? I used Windows Media Encoder. It’s a decent video screen capture utility. You can capture one window, the entire screen, or you can drag your cursor and customized the area you want to capture. I think that there are better screen capture utilities than this one, but this is the one I use. It’s simple to use, and it gets the results I need. If you have a better one to recommend, please post it in the comments.
Marisa Roman
Daniel Brown
Josh Carroll
