EoinMackintosh.com

Gosh every now and again one comes across a little GEM of a piece of software. It’s a thing called The Jing Project. Totally free at the moment and it comes with 200 mb of space at screencast.com.

I wasn’t very sure what this software did until I actually download it and tried it out. I thought it was just another screen capture gizzmo that loaded up to your flickr account but after playing around with it for a few minutes I saw that it does 90sec video clips too. Being a web designer this is really handy.. to be able to show clients something that they are having difficulty with. OK, sure, in 90 secs you are not going to show something in a great detail. You would need camtasia for longer videos but for very quick snapshots of something it’s just perfect.

Once you have registered and download the software you need to set up some pe sets. When you install you are already given a screencast account and user name. You need to set up your own flickr account details and if you want to save to file or even ftp the movie/screenshot for storage on your server you will need to set that up with your user details.

OK so now it’s installed lets take an example. I’ll do a little movie about scribe. It’s a beautiful little extension that you can add to Firefox and blog directly from your Firefox browser. (This is another very handy utility that everyone should have by the way).

I simply clicked on the Jing button that sits on the top of the screen. Selected capture and drew out a window on the screen. Pressed the video button and started talking. After the video is complete you get an option to pick a url, which is just a direct link to the file on screencast.com, or you have the option of selecting the embed code. (You can save to a file or ftp to your server as well). I choose the embed code from screencast.com so that I could put it on this blog post.

Here’s the little video that I did. Completed and uploaded automatically to screencast.com in about 3-4 minutes. The embed code is copied into the clipboard and all you need do is paste the code into the blog.

That’s all there is to it. Sure, the video is not very polished as I did it very quickly for the demonstration, however, perfect for showing someone how to do something quickly.

The other thing you can do with Jing is take a screen capture and annotate it. You can then send the screen capture straight to a file, to ftp, or to your flickr account. Here’s something I did and sent to flickr. Then used the embed code from the clipboard to paste in here.

If you have the need to share screenshots and small videos I highly recommend you take a look at Jing. Heck it’s free

Have you ever wondered how to build your own website? Here’s an excellent video course that takes you by the hand and walks you through the process step by step. You don’t need to know anything about the web. This course will even show you where to get free web design software and software for uploading your website. There are nearly three hours of video in total and an excellent resource for any beginner building their first web site

“Discover The Easy & Free Way To Create A Great Looking Minisite In Thirty Minutes (Or Even Less) – Even – If You’ve Never Created A Web Page Before…”

PLUS – A Special Bonus For You: You Also Get Full Resale Rights To This Product And Website So You Can Sell It Yourself And Keep Every Single Dollar You Make!

Louis Allport will walk you through the process of building a web site from scratch. He shows you where to get free software to build a web site. The videos are done for the beginner – someone who has never ever created a web site before. There are 14 flash videos and they run for a total of 3 hours.

It’s an excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn how to build their first web site. You really will be able to build a web site in 30 mins once you watch these videos.

The resale rights are given away with this product. Once you have got the hang of using the web design software and building your first site then you have a ready made product that you can sell. Just build a mini web site around the videos and sell them yourself!

Click here to see the beginners guide to building a web site.

Here’s a fantastic free software program to help you control spam and keep track of all your email accounts. Keeping track of several e-mail accounts can be annoying. Thankfully, ePrompter’s bare-bones yet effective approach helps you solve this hectic problem.

Utilizing an uncluttered interface and stone-simple setup, ePrompter does one thing and does it well. You can set the application to check up to 16 password-protected e-mail accounts, including Hotmail and AOL. Notification consists of a flag in your system tray–color coded for each different e-mail account–and a choice of five screensaver options. When you get a new message, you simply click the icon and start reading. Composing a new e-mail or responding is just as easy.

ePrompter automatically and simultaneously checks and retrieves your e-mail messages from e-mail accounts, such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, POP3, Earthlink, Excite, Juno, GO, Gmail, Email.com, Mail.com, Mindspring, MSN, MyWay, OneBox, Rediffmail, USA.net, and hundreds of other e-mail domains.

ePrompter not only lets you compose, forward, and reply to your retrieved messages, but also gives you the ability to delete unwanted spam or suspicious-looking mail without having to launch your e-mail program or having to go to your Web mail’s site.

ePrompter notification features include a unique rotating tray icon and a choice of five screensavers that let you know at a glance the number of new messages in each account, as well as audio alerts for new messages. ePrompter also includes autodial for automatic message retrieval.

Version 2.0 build 2 adds supports for Gmail.

Download it free here

Our little organisation can now do top search engine positions for your main keywords. There are links to this on the sidebar but as it is such an important service I have made a dedicated site for it.

Be sure to watch the videos on the site where Brad and Andy of Stompernet explain a few things about search engine marketing. Our service is pretty cheap and if you have a good product to sell online you could make a nice income once to have your kewords in the top pages of the major engines.

Check it out it’s worth looking at : Top Search Positions

I was watching an online program on News 24 on the TV the other day. This guy was explaining a way on how to protect your PC from virus etc. I don’t know if it works as I had never really heard of it before.

Goes like this. You know in XP you can add different users to your computer. An example would be if you had a busy household with lots of kids etc using you computer. What you would do is set up different logins for each user.

The guy explained that when you set up these user accounts you can give them admin rights or limited rights. Basically limited rights would mean that they would not be able to interfere with system settings or add software.

He said that you should set up a log in account for yourself when you are just surfing around the net. The theory being that if your computer only had limited rights then if a virus did get in then it could only harm a small part of the computer on not the important system files.

Sounds a good enough idea to me.

So how do you do it? Pretty simple really. Just go to your “Start” button and then click on the “Control Panel“.

Once the “Control Panel” comes up. Click on the “User Accounts” from there just follow the prompts and set up a Limited account for yourself.

So if you are just surfing around use that login for your computer. If you need to add software etc just come off the net and log on as the administrator and do what you need to do.

Pretty interesting idea.

For those of us that watch the news blogs you will have seen that Google has announced a Premier version of their online collaboration tools.

If you already have a gmail account you get a free version of the applications and will have probably seen links to them at the top of your gmail account. Basically you get access to a Calender, Google Talk, Spreadsheets, Documents, Photos and Easy Web Design. The main software, spreadsheets and docs, are like excel and word with the idea being that you can share and update your documents with other gmail account holders.

The apps are all pretty good and I’d say a great idea to have all your documents online so you can access them from any computer – All you need is an internet connection.

With the recent announcement of the Premier Edition of these tools I had another look at them. There is still a free version but the Premier Edition costs $50 or around £27 per person per year. I kinda thought to myself – if there is a free version why would anyone want to spend $50 for the Premier stuff!

When I read Google’s introduction pages it got me thinking. This actually is a pretty good deal for any business. When you think on the costs involved in setting up computers and software for even a small team, the costs are pretty high. You have to look at things like servers and software etc. Using Google Apps you could do away with that. As long as you have computers and an internet connection, each person in your organisation can log in and use the software. If you apply for the Premier Edition you even get your own domain attached to gmail – so anything@yourdomain.com goes to your gmail account and google are offering 99.9% uptime and support telephone numbers.

So all in all I’d say it is a great budget option for any individual or any business – especially a small start up business – to get software at rock bottom prices. For the most part the free version that comes with a gmail account would do just fine however for $50 per person per year to get domain, admin tools, support etc it’s certainly not going to break the computer budget and is worth looking into.

To get the free version all you need to do is sign up for a gmail account at www.gmail.com

You can read all about the Premier Edition here

If anyone is interested on search optimisation work for their websites. I have just put up a short video of a case study of an ongoing project on my site at http://www.topsearchpositions.co.uk.

You can view the video if you click here.

If you are like me and find photoshop a hard slog. I found a great resource the other week. 101 photoshop Tips, Tricks and Tutorials on DVD.

The video DVD is done by a guy called Mark Monciardini who has won a few awards over the years. The DVD costs $97 but the great thing is you own it and it is not one of those online tutorials where you have to pay a monthly fee. Mark is a bit “hyper” shall we say – but one thing is for sure – he can certainly get the point over and you will learn all the ins and outs of photoshop from him. He does know what he is talking about.

Photoshop Tips and Tutorials