Need screen capture? Get Jing!

So cool! I love it!

Every so often I come across a tool that I just love. Everything good about technology comes together into a tool that just. plain. works.  Exactly the way you want it to!

And this is Jing. It combines simple screen capture (just the image), along with video screen capture (think Camtasia or CamStudio). Now, I have CamStudio, and have been meaning to play with it to produce some of my training videos. I’ve heard horror storie about figuring out Camtasia, (and CamStudio is similar), so I wasn’t really looking forward to it.

Then I found Jing.

Quick installation, cute little ball that sits at the ready on your desktop without getting in the way, and super simple to figure out. Oh, and did I mention free?

For the static images, it has a built in editor that allows you to add text boxes, arrows, and highlight areas. You usually pay for that.

Check it out ~

The video portion lets you record a portion or all of your screen, as well as sound through your microphone. You definitely usually pay for that. You can save it to your computer, save it to screencast.com who will host it for you, save to flickr, or upload it directly via ftp without ever closing Jing or opening your ftp program.

The only downside is a 5 minute limit on the video. But if you’re recording screen capture videos longer than that, you should probably consider Camtasia anyway, as Jing is designed to be a simple, easy to use program. And it really is.

If you want to see a video I created with it, check out my tutorial on Changing the location of your Wordpress blog.