Jing: Capture Images, Record Video, Share Online
Nov 14th, 2007 by William Jones
I recently came across a really cool piece of software called Jing. Jing is a project from TechSmith, the company that brought us the awesome SnagIt program. With Jing, you can capture images, record video, and share them both easily online with others. To get started using Jing, download a small installer for Windows or Mac. The installer will put a small, half-circle widget on your desktop. This widget can be docked on any side of your screen through the preferences, or hidden. Either way, a Jing icon will be in your system tray on Windows. If you hover over the Jing widget, it expands as shown in the image.
The Jing widget allows you to capture images and video, show your history, and change your preferences.
Pressing capture allows you to capture a window or a particular region. You can also move and resize your selected area until your capture area is perfect.
The image capture feature has lots of features. You can add arrows, text boxes, frames, and highlights. Additionally, you can also change the colors of the various element. The default name of the image is the date and time of the capture, but can be renamed by typing over the name field.
Once the image is captures, you can save it locally or share it online. If you click the Share button, the image is uploaded to ScreenCast.com for hosting and a URL of the location of your new upload (image or movie) is copied to your clipboard, which you can paste into a chat application or into an email to instantly share with others. When the other person clicks on the link, they image (or video) will open up in a browser for them to view.
Capturing video is just as easy as capturing images. Once you are happy with you capture region, click the video button. There will be a 3 second delay before full-motion recording starts. From left to right, the controls on the video window are stop, pause, mute, restart, and cancel.
Jing History allows you to see all of your images, video captures, or both.
Lastly, the More section allows you to send feedback, set your preferences, get help, and quit the application.
In summary, Jing is an awesome application that is fun and easy to use if you want to capture images and video to share online. The best thing about Jing is that it is free (at least for now).
