My Tools: Jing

One of the things that I quite often want to do is to show people a snapshot of what I see on my screen. That’s where Jing come in.

Jing does stills and movies and it does both of them in a wonderfully simple elegant way.

Jing appears on the screen as a small yellow/orange half-sphere. When you move over it you get to see three options:

Once you have selected “Capture” you then select the area which Jing automatically helps with by selecting the active window. You don’t have to use this window, but it’s surprising how often that this is exactly what you want to do.

The next thing to choose is what type of capture you want to do. If you select “Image” then you are prompted as to where you want to put it, if you select “Movie” then you are given a count down of 3-2-1 and then you record the movie.

Once captured you then decide what you are going to do with your capture. Again there are some nice features here, including the ability to send directly to Flickr and to screencast.com. The things that I am capturing are normally going into presentations for my work so I normally save them to a file.

Movies are in created in shockwave making them easy to transport and to publish.

I had forgotten how much easier Jing makes this process until I came to write this post. One of the challenges with showing snapshots of a snapshot tool is that you struggle to use the snapshot tool to do it. Going back to alt-prt scr was a real step back in history for me.