Today Adobe® announced the release of Captivate™ 2 for coming October.

Captivate 2 software enables anyone to rapidly create powerful and engaging simulations, software demonstrations, and scenario-based training without programming knowledge or multimedia skills.

Several new features were added to the software. One which excites me most is:

Engage the learner by focusing attention on specific areas. Simply gray out the rest of the screen or magnify a particular screen area with a zoom effect. Both effects can be combined for maximum awareness. The zoom effect retains all interactivity of the enlarged area so learners can focus on practicing a particular task.

Zooming into a scene was not possible with previous versions and by some, who know Camtasias great zooming feature, really missed.

The crew of the German Textpattern resourceblog started publishing videotutorials lately.

Captivate is of course expensive: $599. Qualified educational end users get a reduction of $199.

An OS(Opensource) screencapture tool is WINK. Price: 0$