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