October 2007 Archives
We made these a while ago, and I've been meaning to post them here for some time, now. So here they are :-D
Call it digital schwag, call it freebies, call it what you will. Show your Jing pride on your blog, site, or desktop.
Desktop Wallpapers (single and dual monitor – right click and select “Save As…” or “Save Link As…”)
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Blog Buttons (right click and select “Save As…” or “Save Link As…”)
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Before I begin, in my last post I said I couldn’t find a Mac version. Well, thanks to Don Sherry (Mac Developer on the Jing Project), there IS one! It’s called SumFun, but it plays the same way, and I have links to both versions below.
That said, some folks here at TechSmith have been giving me a hard time about the Jing I posted explaining Summing in that I was looking for a place to put a “4” tile and couldn’t make a good move. Right in front of my face the whole time was a “0 + 0 + 4” combo on the left edge.
My wife, who is also addicted to Summing, and has given me the hardest time, said, and I quote, “Watching your video is painful because it’s RIGHT THERE and you even paused it!”
O.K. Let me first say it’s harder to play Summing when you are also trying to talk and explain. Second, if you think you can do better, let’s see it.
We’ll send a TechSmith T-shirt to the first person who posts a Jing showing a score lower than my score of 23. It can be done. How do I know? My all-time best is an 18. I just don’t have the screenshot to prove it. (Honest! It happened!)
Oh yes—two rules: TechSmith employees aren’t eligible. You all need to get back to work. Secondly, I’m wise to image editing tricks. I’ll be applying TechSmith’s top-secret, unreleased, patent-pending, anti-image-doctoring algorithm to your image. (In other words, we trust you.)
Let’s see what you’ve got.
You may be familiar with Minesweeper, Solitaire, Bejeweled, and Sudoku. Have you ever heard of Summing? This is one of my favorite games on my Palm handheld. They have it for Windows too. Like a lot of little games out there, you never know what you’re getting until you install it. Many times freeware of this nature is unsupported and poorly documented. Summing was really hard for me to explain to my friends. It was virtually impossible to help people understand textually or verbally. (P.S. Of course, I never play this on company time if you’re reading this dear managers.)
Jing helped me on two fronts. First, I made a how-to video for my friends. More importantly, it was a Quimple way for me to capture my high score! Even if you don’t like Summing, the point is that Jing can be a great way to share your addictive, time-consuming discoveries with others.
Watch my Jing (3:26) to see my attempt at explaining Summing to friends.
Click here to see my high score!! (Like golf, a low score is better.)
Quick + Simple = Quimple. It’s a term that started by accident around here—when a couple folks became a little tongue tied when trying to explain the main point of Jing. This newly-minted adjective just might stick around. Who knows? It’s hard to predict when you live in a world with words like Flickr, Skype, and Jing!
Do you think Jing is Quimple? Or maybe something else? Please share your story by emailing us and drop us a short note. Give a little background about where you’re from, how Jing may have changed a part of your life, and maybe a couple of examples. Someone will get in touch with you to shape your story and run it past you. Then, we’ll share it with others so people will be exposed to many great examples. I’ll get it started in the next day or so with a personal example in my next post!
I had a the pleasure of meeting Tris Hussey from blognation Canada and Larix Consulting at Gnomedex earlier this year and he shared with me how he was using Jing for tech support. Remember this post about him? Tris was recently a guest on the television show, The Lab with Leo Laporte, where he showed off how he uses Jing.
Check out Tris' interview with Leo here. It's educational and entertaining! The Jing demo starts around the 40 minute mark.
How are you using Jing?
We're working hard on the features that Tony mentioned. But we wanted to get some fixes out for things that people have found since we released 1.3. Here's what this update contains:
- Fixed possible bugs when sorting in history.
- Spelt our company name right. Oops.
- Remember your settings when logging in and shutting down. This fixes the issue where people kept getting prompted to login or create an account.
You can download it here.
This release brings a few bug fixes we wanted to get out as soon as possible, while we work on features for our next release:
- a fix for video recording on older Macs that previously had black recordings
- better compatibility with OS X 10.5
- fixed a few memory leaks
- fixed a bug where tooltips could show through overlapping windows
- fixed a bug where the display of capture dimensions would stop showing after the user changes the display resolution
Long before we launched Jing, the team and I had visions of people sharing tidbits of daily life on the computer all throughout the various conversations they had online. Whether in the midst of an IM chat, a ongoing email thread or even a blog, our goal was to help make the process as easy and effective as possible.
Now some 90 days or so since launching the Jing Project, we're recognizing through various channels that a noticeable percentage of people are using "Save" more than "Share". While there is absolutely nothing wrong with "saving", we know from our own experience that doing so makes the process of sharing just that more time consuming.
Internally, our goal was to test "sharing" as a part of the Jing Project. So, in our latest release (v1.3), we moved the sign in process for Screencast.com to occur when you 1st login to reduce the burden of having to do so once you've already captured and are ready to share. To our surprise we immediately had thousands of new users signing up for Screencast.com accounts and we hope that encourages people to take advantage of our offer for free hosting. We really want to witness what the world could be like when sharing content with another person is literally just a "share" button away.
Now for those that just don't want to use Screencast.com or can't for privacy reasons, there's no obligation to use your account. We do however need all users to at least sign up for Jing so we can get a better handle on how many active users we have. This helps us better understand where we can take Jing in the future.
Now, what we have learned is that a lot of you want to share to other places. To that point, I'll be sharing some news later this week on our efforts to that regard. Until then, keep "sharing" those Jings...
Hi folks,
Unfortunately we had a bug in our latest release that you may be experiencing. If you keep seeing a prompt to log into Screencast.com every time you start Jing, you are victim to this annoying bug.
The good news is that there is a simple fix. The next time you see this prompt, go ahead and log in one more time. Then immediately click the "More" button on the launcher to open the settings. Once the settings are open, just go ahead and close it by click on the "checkmark". This will in turn save your settings so that it remembers your login automatically from here on out.
Sorry for the annoyance, you can rest assured we'll have this addressed in our next update.
So, the developers posted short descriptions of the latest changes to Jing, but I thought I'd post a quick video. Isn't it easier to understand something when you can see it?
Okay, lots of new stuff in our 1.3 release!
When capturing, we show selection dimensions, and now have a 3..2..1 countdown before video recording starts. We also tell you if the microphone is on or muted, and remember if you previously had it muted. And we let you Restart a video if you make a mistake while recording. We also think we fixed a bug with selecting the default sound input.
When editing an image capture, you'll notice new arrows and text boxes and new undo/redo buttons (command-z and command-shift-z still work too).
When sharing, we no longer interrupt your first share to sign you up for Screencast.com. Now we handle that when you first launch Jing. We also improved support for authenticating proxies.
It's now much easier to get the html code for embedding shared items in your blog or website by using a new menu on the Share button, and improvements to Screencast.com like Click To Play make your pages load much faster!
The History window now allows sorting and filtering to help you find old items quicker, and when the mouse lingers over a thumbnail for a second, a new little window appears to show more information about that item. Also, we show each item's name and size below its thumbnail.
The Screencast.com team made a little video showing their newest features, including Click To Play
We've been working hard to try and address some of the requests we've heard. You can download the new version of Jing here.
Here's what this build includes:- We've simplified the sign up process so that we don't interrupt when you're trying to capture and share. We now handle this when you first launch Jing.
- When selecting the area to capture, dimensions of the selected area now show up as a mouse tooltip.
- You can now get HTML embed code when sharing items so they can quickly be put in your blog or website.
- The history window now allows you to sort and filter your shares. You'll also get a small window with capture information when you mouse over the shares.
- Lots of image editing improvements:
- You can now resize and move drawing objects.
- Text boxes can now be re-edited.
- We've added a fresh new look for our callouts and arrows.
- Undo and Redo buttons (you can also use Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y if you like).
- Video recording improvements:
- Video recording now has a countdown to give you some breathing room before the recording starts.
- You can now restart your video recording if you make a mistake.
- We remember the state of the microphone so you don't have to keep muting it.
We've been soaking in all the great feedback we've been getting in regards to The Jing Project. Thank you sooo much for all your enthusiastic feedback. Tomorrow, we are releasing an update that will improve your experience using Jing - especially around image editing, the video recording user experience and the ability to better locate media in your Jing History.
I won't spill any more details until tomorrow, but I did want to mention that once we release this tomorrow you'll be presented with this update the next time you go to use Jing. We'll definitely send out an update on the blog explaining all its new shiny chrome.
As always, we look forward to your feedback as you continue to find a home for Jing in your daily conversations.
Take Care,
Tony Dunckel
Product Manager, The Jing Project
P.S. Check out Matt's helpful post about Screencast.com and its role with the Jing Project - great info if you were ever confused about its purpose.
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