Gyration
Bob Murray, national sales manager for Gyration, began by explaining the company's name. "When people ask what we do, we tell them we gyrate," he said. The company was formed in 1984, largely by Stanford engineers working on gyroscope technology. Although major advances had been made in technology, gyroscopes hadn't changed much since 1963, and the engineers felt they could advance the field.

Gyration's engineers have miniaturized the gyroscope so it can be put into a handheld mouse, for example, and react to how the mouse is moved. A sophisticated radio frequency (RF) transmission sends the appropriate signals to the receiver in the cradle. No line-of-sight is required.

He illustrated the points he was making by showing the very mouse used to control a slide show from a distance. Ordinarily, SPCUG presenters are trapped behind a folding table to the left of the stage so they can work the computer that controls the display. Murray used the wireless mouse to control his display, so he could move around to make a more effective presentation. "The idea is that people should pay attention to your presentation, not to the object you're using," he explained.

The mouse he used, the Gyromouse Presenter, uses a rechargeable nickel metal hydride battery. The battery lasts 13 hours, and the mouse contains an extra battery, so it could be used for 26 hours continuously. It comes with a recharging cradle that plugs into a PS2 port.

The Gyromouse is a two-button mouse with a mouse ball on the bottom, so it can be used as a regular mouse, on a mouse pad. But it also has a gyroscope inside that tracks its movement, and "allows me to hold it up in free space and point it just like I would a flashlight," Murray said. "I can point it left and right and up and down. It picks up the angular motion of your hand. I can also do this with my left hand as well."

Gyration created the mouse to look and act like a Microsoft mouse, allowing it to be configured as a left- or right-handed mouse.

Both the Pro model ($99) and the Presenter ($189) are cordless, and simple to install, with no driver software needed. The Pro has a 40-foot range, and the Presenter a 100-foot range, Murray said.

"If you were doing a presentation in a room like this you would be looking at about 80 feet back and forth. I was actually going out into the hall over there earlier today."

The Gyromouse also has security codes built into it, which are coordinated with the receiving cradle, to insure that only the appropriate mouse can control each computer. The receiver base is both receiver and recharger, and comes with both PS2 and serial connections. A USB connector is optional.

Audience: Do you have to train it to recognize your movements?

Answer: No, it works right out of the box. You can adjust the sensitivity with the mouse control panel. We tell people to use it like a flashlight, but when people first use it, they frequently want to slow it down a bit until they get used to it.

Audience: If the mouse responds to your hand movement, do you have to hold in a button?

Answer: Yes, you do. There is a little indentation and my finger just kind of sits in there. It is what we call a trigger button. But you can double-click it and it will always be on. We actually patented this whole idea of using an inertial sensor or a gyroscope to pick up the angular motion of your hand and move a cursor or an object on the screen.

Audience: Can you use more than one of these mice on a computer?

Answer: "Yes, you can, but you need a good splitter on the port you're connected to. And there aren't many. We use one from PI Engineering in Michigan, which intelligently splits the PS2 port and lets you use two mice. You can't really use them simultaneously. In this particular case, I'm using one here and using another one over here. I'd be fighting myself if I try to use both of them. But you could use both of these, say, if you and I both wanted to do a presentation and I was doing the first part and you were doing the second part, or if you wanted to interact, you could easily do that."

Audience: Suppose a user is at the computer using his mouse, and you show up and want to show him something. But you don't want to climb over him to grab his mouse, you want to use your own. Can it be used that way?

Answer: "Yes, it can, but again you'll need a good splitter for that. We have splitters that will split a PS2 or a USB port. We have a number of churches who buy these from us. Their idea is that they have a person at the back of an auditorium who can take control of the display if, say, the pastor has some problems with it. Those range from about $235 to about $49.

"You can get those for Mac or PC, and there are also PS2-to-USB and USB-to-PS2 adapters. None of these require loading any drivers, so the installation process is very simple."

Bob showed an adapter from PI Engineering, and said you can use it to connect two Gyro mice, a Gyro mouse and regular mouse or keyboard, or any other combination.

Bob also showed new products, not due out until May: the Gyro Remote, a radio-linked product; a wireless keyboard that comes with a snap-on cover so it can be dropped in a briefcase.

"People ask how long this keyboard will last if I'm using it in a conference room or at my desk." he said. "Our testing typically shows that if you were to type on this as fast as you could for an hour each day for seven days a week, the batteries in here would last a little over six months. If you typed every day on it, it would last about a month and a half. There are four AAA batteries in here."

"It has no built-in mouse, because our focus studies showed us that people using it would use either the keyboard or the mouse 80% of the time, and the other device the other 20% of the time. And it wasn't a mouse that was easy to move around.

"We decided our regular Gyro mouse, which you can use like a regular mouse, was a better solution. Anyone who has a computer knows how to use a regular mouse on the desktop and a regular keyboard."

The radio receiver, Bob said, can receive from up to eight different devices at a time. So you could buy the remote and the mouse, and later add just the keyboard and it would link right in to the receiver. Gyration may add a game controller at a later date, he added. The receiver is already certified in 44 different countries, he noted, and connects via USB.

It uses a solid state gyroscope that can withstand 1,800 Gs (gravities). "That is a lot. I think 1,020 Gs is a six-foot drop on the concrete, and that is the Gyro itself. So it may be more like nine feet for the Gyro, and then you have all of the plastic wrapped around it. Typically you are going to have some type of plastic that is going to break instead. We also use four AAA batteries in here.

"We have also increased our security codes to 65,000, and we assign those at the factory so that theoretically you should never run into the same ID as someone else, and then you would have to be on the same channel as well."

"Now we also have a number of gestured commands. I can actually bring up a presentation tool, or I can start a CD. [Music playing.] That is some piano music I started. I can turn that off as well. I can also start a DVD drive if I want. Those are some of the presentation tools that I have. If I want to start that music up again I simply shake my wrist. It takes a little time for my CD to start up but it will go, and I can also continue with this presentation as well. Our whole gyro pointing technology is patented by Gyration."

Audience: What is the life expectancy for the hardware?

Answer: "Years. We have units that have been in the field for ten years. The technology is better now. The gyroscopes are better.

"In reality, as with any product, you are probably going to get one that is going to come back within a month. Bur we have one tech support person in our company and we probably have 150,000 units out in the field, and he is not busy. That says a lot about the product. You should be able to call and get him at any time."

Bob noted there is a discount on their products for user group members, and referred the audience to brochures available in the lobby that listed details.

The company also offers a set of tools that can be activated and used remotely.

"This is an arrow that I can come in here and stamp in different places. This one is a highlighter. I have just set it up as a straight highlighter. You can make it wider or smaller. You can see I have set it up as a straight line so you can't draw a crooked line on it.

"There is also a break timer. I can be in the middle of my PowerPoint presentation and if I see that half of you are falling asleep, I can say, let's take a 15-minute break and I bring this up and everyone can leave. This way you don't have to depend on everyone having to synchronize his or her watches.

"There are some other things. This is a hide and reveal. You remember the overheads where you put a paper up there to cover part of the screen. This is one of four screens that we have. You can make this screen any color or any pattern. These come in the tools.

"This is another type of reveal. This is a rectangle with round corners. This is a snapshot tool. You can see that little hourglass or magnifying glass. I would use it if I were going to capture an area. We call these tools Gyrotools.

"There are also multimedia tools where you can start a CD, stop it, pause it, or go to the next song on it. You can start a DVD playing. I could say, Let's take a break, and then I could bring up a DVD movie-say at lunch time-so people could watch it and stick around here. There are a lot of things you can do with those tools. We get ideas all of the time from schools and businesses that say, 'I like this tool, but could you change it this way?'"

Audience: Are these products going to interface with Bluetooth?

Answer: "We are following it closely, but we don't know if it will be the best standard. It might be a great one for video only but we're just not sure yet. Also, the price on it is really high."

SnagIt and Camtasia
Techsmith finds real users of their programs to make presentations to groups, which resulted in Ken Hopkins, SPCUG's meeting coordinator and Sacra Blue layout editor, extolling the merits of these two programs at the last general meeting on April 16. Ken actually uses the programs, and when we had a shareware presentation in November, SnagIt was his own favorite program.

SnagIt
Ken began demonstarting SnagIt by discussing the Print Screen key on your keyboard. It doesn't actually print the screen, he noted, it copies the screen image to the clipboard, and from there it can be pasted into Paintbrush, where you can save it or print it. But that involves a lot of steps, Ken noted, which can be simplified by using SnagIt.

Configuring the Capture Key
First he described how he configured SnagIt to use Print Screen as the default capture key. Then Ken showed how pressing the Print Screen key brings up a preview box. [Note: SnagIt can be configured so that pressing the Print Screen key immediately prints the screen. –Ed.]

In the preview box, he can specify what to do with the image, and what format to save the file as. But SnagIt does much more than that.

Ken set the options to capture a window, and demonstrated how pressing the Print Screen key brought up a capture box, whose size could be adjusted to change what is captured. But if that's too much work, he said, he could turn off the preview screen and just save a file, and give it a random file name automatically each time he pressed Print Screen. Ken was saving images as JPEG files, but he noted you could save screen captures in many formats: GIF, PCX, PNG, and even TIF.

"This is great for when you're doing documentation, and you need to capture screen shots," Ken said. "You get to a certain point and hit Print Screen and it just saves it for you. If you want, you can set up preview so it shows you what it's capturing before it saves the file."

You can also configure the program to save a region, a fixed region, or an object. "For example, I can do a capture of just that icon," Ken said, "which is very small but great for documentation purposes."

Capturing Graphics
SnagIt can also capture a graphic file, so you can save someone else's picture file, as long as it displays on your screen and can be captured to the clipboard. Because SnagIt saves in so many different formats, you can use it for file conversion.

You can even capture from a program by selecting a program file and capturing the icons, bitmaps, and even cursors inside the program.

If you're documenting someone's program, Ken said, you can capture all these small pieces, then print them in the documentation.

Ken pointed out that the default capture key for the program is Ctrl-Shift-P. "I have trouble remembering that," he said, "so the first thing I do whenever I install SnagIt is change the hotkey to Print Screen. That just makes more sense to me."

Once an image is captured, it can be sent to a file; directly to the printer; to an e-mail—it will create the file and bring up your e-mail program; or a catalog, which creates thumbnails you can view in your browser.

One very powerful option is AutoScroll. If this option is activated, the program can scroll a page and capture the entire page, even parts that don't show on the screen. "I’ve got the Auto Scroll on so I will go to the very top of the page and I’ll hit my Print Screen and it pops up and says, 'Which window do you want to do?'

"I will indicate, 'this one.' It starts doing the capture on that part of the page, then it scrolls itself up and it says how big this thing is. It is beginning to be a big file. It is going to make this great big file and it scrolls it all and then it lets you print it. It is scrolling one page at a time. It is actually building a big bit batch of this file as it stands. Because I have the preview on, we are going to get to see what that preview looks like. This is a battery for building battling robots."

Audience: When you have a Web page that is wider than the screen and you are capturing, is it capturing only the width of the screen? Then can you move over and, as you scroll down, capture a scroll down on the other side? I have never been able to get a scroll down on the right side to work. I’ve always had to take them in sections.

Answer: I am not sure of that. I know that this has got some really wide pages and it adjusted accordingly so that it all fit right.

Watch Your File Size
Ken noted that his capture was creating a huge file because his color is set to True Color. The bitmap said the picture was 1006 x 18,929 pixels. When capturing, he suggested, you may want to set screen resolution to a lower figure to avoid overly large capture files. Ken's computer warned him of low memory, which he attributed to saving the image in a high resolution. Next Ken demonstrated capturing text, rather than an image.

"I could also say I want to do a text capture as well as a image capture. What it will do is the same type of thing. I still have my Auto Scroll set. Then I hit my Print Screen and when the preview comes up, you are going to see only the text. It is going through and doing the scroll bit again, but this time it is just pulling the text out. It doesn’t care where it gets this. There are a lot of things I was not able to capture any other way, but I could with SnagIt. So as a documentary tool, I found this thing fantastic to have.

"This is what it looks like in the preview. The disadvantage is that it is not going to make the page breaks for you where you really want to."

Question: Can you minimize it when it is doing this?

Answer: No. You are stuck waiting for this to happen. It actually is reading the screen.

Question: Will it capture the other pages that you are pointing to?

Answer: No. This is the text. This is what it has captured. Because of the formatting and such it does look a little funny but it does have the text. On a Web page I’m not sure this makes a whole lot of sense, because I can just as easily come over and say Edit, Select All, and copy that, and see the same equivalent of it.

SnagIt can also do a video capture, Ken pointed out. "What is in SnagIt is really a starting point for the second program that I am going to show you, which is Camtasia."

Ken noted that SnagIt's video capture has many options, but because Camtasia is far more powerful, he spent little time on it.

You can, however, enable captions and insert captions on the videos as they are captured, along with data like user name, date, and time.

Camtasia
Ken's other demonstration was of Camtasia, a program similar to SnagIt, but that captures video rather than still images. It's also from Techsmith.

Using SnagIt as the demonstration program, Ken started Camtasia and specified that he wanted to capture a window and save it to a file. When he clicked the record button, it asked which window to record.

Once it was recording, Ken went to SnagIt and opened the "About" box, then stopped the recording. When he played back the file he had just recorded, it showed exactly what he had done.

The file is created in AVI format, and "they wrote their own codec for screen capture." There are a number of different settings that can be selected, including playback speed.

Ken noted that the window he selected was larger than the window he used to record, which meant some of the material was cut off. He specified a larger window and ran the test again. This time the entire image was contained in the playback window. He noted that different videos can be combined into one, if desired.

"Now what would you use this for?" he asked.

Uses for Camtasia
One use would be to demonstrate a software program. "Say you wrote a program and you want to demo it for somebody and not give them the actual program to work with. You can do a movie of it. You can use it for documentation. This can easily be embedded into a Help file. Instead of having to write a whole lot of text, you can say, 'Press this to see how to do it,' and it will just go through and play the movie for you.

"It can also be used for where you have someone out there who knows less about computers than you do, and they are always asking you questions. Instead of figuring out how to write it up for that e-mail, you just run it once, capture it, send off the AVI to them and they have got the movie. They can play it back as many times as they need until they finally get it right. You can show all of the bits and pieces that way."

Question: Can you also add sound to that—voice-over for example—for the instructions?

Answer: That is a separate program, called DubIt, which is included in the bundle package they make. You can actually plug a mike in and record as you are going along. I will show another program, separately, that lets you add sound later if you want. We can do our captures this way. This also has a live mode, so that you can capture a screen and put it right on the Web.

"This one actually makes sense to me, putting it on the Web because this one you could use for live demos to somebody over the Internet. If you had them on the telephone and you wanted to show it, they could get on the Internet and connect through. They could actually see you running the program and you could do it live for them. We can record audio as we go along. We can record the cursor sounds as they happen and keyboard sounds."

Pricing
The normal retail price for SnagIt is $39.95 when ordered over the Web. For Camtasia, it is $149.95. They have given SPCUG "the best deal," Ken said, "which is a bundle, consisting of SnagIt, Camtasia, and DubIt for $169.95. They have given us a 10% discount on all of those so we get them for $35.95, $134.95, and $152.95. All you have to do is to specify what the user group is when you are making the order. The version you have right here will work." [Note: Ken passed out CDs containing demo versions of the software. –Ed.]

"When you call them up all they are giving you is a magic number, which is tied to your name. Whatever name you give them is what the key is based upon—not upon your computer but on your name. It will only work under your name."

Another program Ken didn't show is named Producer, and it allows the user to combine AVI files, even in different AVI formats, into one video movie. It even allows making the movie into an executable file.