January 4, 2008...8:24 am
Free Fridays #7 Jing Project
I came across a great screen capture project the other day called Jing. It runs on Windows and Mac OS X and is incredibly easy to use because only the essentials have been included in this programme.
You can use Jing to capture screen shots of your computer screen or make videos of what you see on screen. This is a great way of creating a video tutorials, discussing changes to web sites in fact showing someone how to do just about anything online. Screenshots as created as PNG files and you can add arrows, text and highlights to the image to explain the image.
Video is created is SWF format (flash) and there is no delay between creating the screen capture and the file becoming available for use. Audio can be recorded as well if you have a microphone.
Whether you are creating video or a screenshot, one of the nice features is that you just drag a box of any size over the area of screen that you’d like to capture.
Share Your Creations Online
The great strength of Jing is that once you’ve created your screenshot or video you can easily upload it to an online location ready for sharing. The URL where the file has been shared to is immediately available for you to paste into an email or chat programme.
Screenshots can be uploaded to Flickr or any web server by inputting FTP details during the set up stage. As an added extra, Jing comes with a free account at Screencast.com where you can store up to 200MB of video and transfer 1GB per month. Ordinarily, the free trial account at screencast.com is limited to 60 days, but Jing users receive a complementary account which remains free for the duration of Jing’s status as a project.
Which brings me to the crunch. Jing is run by TechSmith, the creators of Camtasia Studio. Camtasa Studio is a full featured application which is used by many to create screencasts and video tutorials. It currently retails for $299. So why is a company with an industry leading product producing a free product?
Well Jing is not Camtasia. It’s not as feature rich (no bad thing) and it won’t satisfy everyone’s needs. So TechSmith are running Jing as a free project for the moment with the caveat that Jing will develop into a different project at some point. i.e. they may start to charge for it soon. My feeling is that they are trying to create an ultra simple product that will either be free or very low cost in order to generate business for their screencast hosting company screencast.com.
There’s no specified end date for the project - which began in July 07 - but give Jing a try. Even if they decide to charge for the software, the content that you create with the free version will still be usable as you can save everything as PNG or SWF files and there is no watermarking on anything you create.
You can download and try out Jing at www.jingproject.com
Leave a Reply