Jing! Timing Is Everything!
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TechSmith released a new project today: Jing. What is Jing? Think a quick, clean, simple combination of Snagit, Camtasia, and Screencast.com. In short, Jing lets you take a screenshot or screen recording, annotate it, send it to your Screencast.com account, and then (the best part) provides you a link and/or code so that you can post that content right away.
Right away? Screen recordings? Yeah, right… I hear all you skeptics out there. Well, you need to try it. What, you don’t have time? Ok. I’ll do it. Let me get some help. Bruce is going to time me while I record the steps to create a Custom Show in PowerPoint 2007. He is going to start the timing when I click the record button in Jing, and stop the timing when I paste the link/shortcut code into this blog post.
Ready?
OK. Three minutes and five seconds later, I have a one minute video recorded, rendered, and uploaded to Screencast.com. Size? 3.42 M
You can check the video out here.
Pretty amazing, huh?
But wait - there’s more!
You can also do static screenshots in the same way. With screenshots, you get the added benefit of being able to annotate the screenshot. Click here, and you can see an annotated Jing screenshot.
How does it work? Install it and see. You can download it from the Jing website. What you need and how it works is all described there and in the Jing blog.
I think that Jing is going to change a lot of how I work. For example, there are times when text just won’t really cut it for a newsgroup answer. It would be so much easier to provide a screenshot or quick recording so that the answer is clear and complete. Newsgroups are text only, though, so that hasn’t been easy to do. Now, with Jing, I can just record the answer and post the link. Everyone gets access to the answer and I don’t have to mess with private emails.
I record things for clients regularly to answer questions. With Jing, I can record the entry and send an email with the link using one machine and blog about it with the same link using another machine.
Oh… did I mention the other cool factor for Jing? It is TechSmith’s first product for the Mac! I’ll let you know what Bruce thinks of it once he puts it on his Mac.
Jing is changing my world. I think it will change yours too.
Tags: techsmith, jing, powerpoint, custom show, screen recording, screenshot
7 Comments
» Jing could make sending a screenshot or screencast painless A View from the Isle: Social Media, Blogging, Tech, and Opinion from Tris Hussey
July 18th, 2007
at 7:30am
[…] Elsewhere I read Lockergnome’s review (which I found a tad thin and co-opted) and Assistive Technology’s review which might not have been detailed, but doesn’t sound co-opted. […]
Disruptive Conversations
July 18th, 2007
at 1:25pm
Jing - a new …
Have you ever been in an IM or email conversation and wanted to quickly show someone a screenshot or screencast/video of something on your screen? But didn’t want to go through the hassle of saving a file and then uploading…
The Jing Project : Snagit Guide
July 19th, 2007
at 5:38am
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Ms. Wahala
July 19th, 2007
at 6:32am
eff me. a TechSmith product for the Mac? *drools on screen* It’s like, the only thing I still use windows for except Veoh TV and Real Player’s beta.
Lisa Angelettie
July 19th, 2007
at 10:11pm
I must admit - the only reason why I still have my practically brand new HP laptop is for video creation in flash. Otherwise — I’m posting it on ebay! I’m very excited about this project and look forward to see where they go with this.
Ms. Wahala
July 31st, 2007
at 9:38pm
I got it and installed it and it worked great. had some install trouble but the recent update fixed it. The software even unmounted itself from my Mac hard drive.
Dave J. (Scoop0901)
September 2nd, 2007
at 4:39pm
I looked at Jing when it was first announced, but my major problem with it is that they say — and I admit, I haven’t really read up on it to see if there is a workaround — that you must upload to screencast.com, TechSmith’s pay-to-use video hosting site.
I have several domains, all with their own hosting packages, and plenty of bandwidth with each package. I want my stuff on my domains, not on a social networking site.
So, is there a way to upload to other sites, or does it work only with screencast.com? I am just too busy to spend the time to hunt down this piece of info for a piece of software that announces upfront that the content must go to a specific site.
I’ve been using TechSmith products for many years: SnagIt since 1994 or 1995, and Camtasia Studio for about five or six years now, so I am not simply bashing a company “just because.” For all of the stuff I do, I want all content to be on the site it’s affiliated with, not on the ScreenCastSpace place designated by a tool. You know what I mean?
Cheers,
Dave