How can I create a quick tutorial for my team mates by capturing what I do on my desktop ? Are there any free tools to achieve this?

Really speaking the well developed and free screen capture tools (for windows) are very limited. This seems to be one of the areas where open source resolution hasnt really kicked off. BUT, there is always hope. While I have been looking at FREE tutorial creation, demonstration and screen capturing tools which can be alternatives to products like Camtasia, Adobe activate are rare. But here are some of the tools I came accross and I liked.

Wink

Jing

Camstudio

Webinaria

UltraVNC

Wink: A very powerful tool but buggy. It still is one of my favorites. It breaks the screen capture in a series of editable frames which can then be built into a single swf file. The frames can be added with voice, various text bubbles, URLs etc. However there are so many bugs and the development is extremely slow (since it seems there is just one person developing it) and support community isn’t great either.  Some of the bugs we noticed: If you have lot of slides/frames with voice and added annotations, doesnt publish the sound after 15-20 slides. Had to break my presentation into 4 different smaller ones. There is more but this should suffice. We wish it was a being developed at a faster rate because this tool has a lot of promise. I dotn think that Wink is open source or not (although it is free). I believe the way wink works, is a great direction for a screen capture tool and hope that the development progresses faster, may be if they made it open source the pace will pickup faster? Available for Windows as well as various versions of Linux

Jing : Jing is a free tool from Techsmith (same company which offers Camtasia). It is another one of my favorites just because it is so quick and easy to work with. Few great features are slick gui, quick start, seamless recording and has options to upload on web. You can also take a quick screen shot of the computer and then add your comments to it. The major problem is that it only records only about 5 minutes worth of presentation in one file. This makes sense because if you go beyond 5 minutes you may end up filling your disk space quite heavily. You can pause in between the captures but cannot edit the video. It is a great tool for video blogging and looks like the development is going pretty fast too. At present Jing is available for MAC and Windows.

Camstudio: A tool with great promise but almost non-existant development or community, but seems to have picked up some since Jan 2008.  Still this is one of my favorites, just because the operation itself is so smooth. With little bit of understanding of how to set different options, you will be good to go. You have the choice of recording to flash or SWF and you also have annotations that you can use while recording.

webinaria: Webinaria is open source screen recording software with features very similar to wink. It records your captures in frames and you can later edit these frames. Later you can convert the software into a flv file and or publish it online (yay!). The direction of the software looks really great. The editor itself needs a lot of work. I could hardly browse through different frames. I dont think you can add voice to each and every frame, rather it records the voice as you go. But I couldnt really get the voice to work.  The text adding features (add text to a frame) are quite rudimentary and there is no way you can add a delay to any of the slides or introduce a “next frame , previous frame” kind of buttons. Its a great start and I sure wish they continue on the great path. Not sure if it is available for any other platform, but the source can be download and probably built on other platforms.

Ultra VNC Screen recorder: Looks like a decent option, only I couldnt get it to run on any of the XP laptops I have. It always crashed whenever I chose a region.

ConferencingNOW: Although a web conferencing tool, I have successfully used it as a screen capture tool. But its basic use is during collaboration, so we will not talk about it in much detail.

Note: I have captured the tools which work on windows. There may be other free tools that you may know of. If you do, please leave a note here, I am constantly looking for more tools.