Utilities

Camtasia Studio 3.0
TechSmith (www.techsmith.com)

TechSmith's Karl Bulkley

I fell in love with this awesome screen cam tool—few other competing products have come close to matching the extensive feature set this Flash-capable demonstration toolkit has offered its users.

The clean and intuitive interface, the ease of editing, the new SCORM-compliant quizzing feature, the multiformat output option (including Flash 8 and Quicktime 7 support), and the increasingly popular side-by-side video option of the presenter windowed anywhere within a screen playback roll up to a package that anyone seeking to demonstrate an application, configuration, presentation, or workflow will be hard pressed to find a competing demo application as feature-rich, simple to use and competitively priced as TechSmith's Camtasia Studio. As a fellow Jolt judge remarked "Camtasia rocks! What I really like about this utility is that it supports formats other than SWF: I want to be able to export a movie as a Quicktime MOV or a Windows Media video."

—Mike Riley

Productivity Award Winners

DevPartner Studio 8
Compuware (www.compuware.com/products/devpartner)

Version 8 of Compuware DevPartner continues the company's history of providing top-notch development tools. The suite contains diagnostic tools for software developed in Visual Studio—performance analysis, code coverage, error detection and static code analysis, memory usage monitoring and reporting, and performance profiling. These tools are integrated as one-click plug-ins to Visual Studio and generate useful data that makes almost any code base more robust.

—Andrew Binstock

Fog Creek Copilot 1.2
Fog Creek Software (www.fogcreek.com)

Helping with a computer problem remotely is like shooting in the dark. If you can't see their screen, it's hard to troubleshoot or walk through an example. Enter Copilot from Fog Creek Software. Copilot may not be particularly sexy but it does one thing well: It lets you quickly control another PC without having to install remote control software on the target machine.

—Robert A. DelRossi

ReSharper 1.5
JetBrains (www.jetbrains.com)

ReSharper is a classic case of "saw the need and filled it well." For C# developers working in Visual Studio 2003 (a VS 2005 version is in beta), ReSharper extends and improves the Intellisense autocompletion technology, providing a panoply of refactorings, including a powerful renaming utility, Extract Method, Change Method Signature, Convert Interface to Abstract Class, and many more.

—Rick Wayne