MacMost Now 136: Free Screen Capture Software

Gary Rosenzweig looks at Jing from TechSmith. This free screen capture software for Mac and Windows allows you to quickly capture and share images and video from your computer.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary from MacMost Now. Today I want to tell you about some quick, easy, and free screen-capture software. So, while I was at the blog-world expo in Las Vegas this last weekend, I came across the TechSmith booth. They're mostly known for Camtasia software on windows, which hopefully will soon be coming to Mac. But they already have a Mac product, and it's call Jing. Jing is really easy to use screen-capture software. I'll let Katie from TechSmith explain.
We were using our existing applications SnagIt and Camtasia studio to do a lot of screen-video-recording and screen-capture and we though, well, geez, wouldn't it be awesome if you could just easily share this information instead of having to produce a file, save it, put it in an email, attach it, send it, send the file, and have someone download it and then watch the video or open the link - open the image, and so we thought: all right we have this technology all we have to do is just make it easy and just have this share button. So, the developers went to work and they created the product that is now called Jing Project, and um very simple, easy to share, and we were using it so much we though, well, geez, wouldn't everyone else love to use a product like this? And visual communication is something we feel really strongly about, so we wanted to get Jing out there and help people be able to visually communicate instead of just explaining everything in words, so, check out Jing.
So, Jing has a pretty unique interface. It's got this little sun that appears on your desktop and you can move it around to the corners of your screen, or the sides, or the top, and you can go ahead and roll over it and then click on the Capture button. Then you define an area that you want to capture. So, if you wanted to show somebody something in the preferences, here, you'd select an area, and then select if you want to do an image, or a video, or whatever. You do the image. Once you draw the image it grabs it, and now you can draw stuff on it. Like, you can draw an arrow, or write a piece of text. That type of thing. When you're finished, you can decide where to save it. You can even save it to a free service called ScreenCast.com from TechSmith, that puts it up and creates a place for you to share things. You can also save it to your Flickr account, or your own FTP server, or just to a file. Same options are available for video. Jing's very easy to use, and when you share something with somebody it's actually done in flash format, so it's gonna be widely avail and cross-platform. Unfortunately of course it also saves as a flash format when you save files locally, so it's not gonna be as useful for doing something you wanna put into an iMovie movie or use in another way.
So, everything about Jing is about making it real easy, the least number of steps, the easiest way to share something. So, if you want to point out something to a friend, you can send a quick screen-shot of what you mean, or do a really quick video. So, it's all about ease of use, not necessarily features. The best thing about Jing is it's free. So, you might as well download it and try it. You can go ahead and find it at jingproject.com
Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 4 Responses to “MacMost Now 136: Free Screen Capture Software”

Daniel

16 years ago

Very cool tip!
Can't wait to try out the new software.

Umar Bindir

I hope this software will meet my requirements. If it does, then that would be the best gift ive got in 2008

golp

15 years ago

thanks for info, as for me I prefer to use Macvide ScreenCap

vurs

mmm...agree, Macvide ScreenCap nice prog

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 136: Free Screen Capture Software

Comments: 4 Responses to “MacMost Now 136: Free Screen Capture Software”

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