Jing: Easy screen capture and sharing (and its free!)

I have been using Jing (by TechSmith) for months now to take on-the-fly screen captures and screen casts and sharing them with friends and colleagues. Prior to Jing I was (and still am) a big fan of SnagIt (also by TechSmith). If you’re familiar with SnagIt then you will notice that Jing picks up where SnagIt leaves off: Online sharing built in and its Free!

Jing is a free program for both Mac OS X and Windows. By default it will startup with your system and sit silently on your desktop. When you’re ready to take a screen shot you simply hover over it, and select capture. Your mouse cursor is replaced with a set of cross hairs which you use to draw the area on the screen you would like to capture (like SnagIt, it will snap the capture area to open windows). After the capture area is selected you simply choose the type of capture you would like to perform: image or video. Once the capture is complete, Jing will give you an opportunity to annotate the image if you wish. Now you simply click “share” and the image will be uploaded to Screencast.com and a link to the image will be placed in your clipboard. You can then past it into an email, IM chats, documents or whatever. It literally takes a few seconds to take a screen shot and past the link.

Here is a video showing Jing in action. The version illustrated is a bit old but you’ll get the idea:

Its is fairly flexible too (and yes you can disable the star interface if you wish). Rather than uploading a screen shot to Screencast.com you can upload it to Flickr, an FTP site or store it locally. Its a great way to illustrate bugs (your QA team should be using this), demonstrate functionality and show code.

So what’s the catch? Jing is free… for now. The folks at TechSmith put it like this:

Jing is a concept that we’re evaluating to see if it can improve everyday conversations. Determining if Jing will be a product is what we are trying to do by gathering feedback from people like you.

Also you need to be aware of your Screencast.com account limits:

Your content is hosted on Screencast.com, for which we are providing a complimentary account to all participants during this project. Users have 200MB of space for storing screenshots and screencasts and 1 GB of bandwidth that renews monthly. The Screencast.com account will remain available to you for the duration of the project.

All in all its a great tool to help communicate ideas. Certainly worth checking out.

Jing Project by TechSmith

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