Greetings friends, family, colleagues, customers and newcomers too—welcome everyone. As some of you know we started the Jing Project earlier this year to get your feedback, input and ideas as we developed this new technology. The project’s goal is to create an incredibly simple, always-ready tool for capturing, enhancing, and sharing screenshots and screencasts in seconds.

So far over 250,000 people have downloaded Jing, and thousands have given us great feedback. As you know at TechSmith, we believe the best way to make truly great software is to have you and many others be part of the creative process. The motley crew you see in the photo above has been working like mad to include much of your feedback into the new version of Jing. As you can see, the snow has started to fly here in Michigan and we are now ready to hear what you think.

So, some of you may be asking – how can I use a screenshot, and a lot more of you are probably asking how can I use a screencast, or what is a screencast? Screenshots and screencasts are perfect visual elements for enhancing online conversations via email, instant messaging, social networks, blogs, community groups and forums. A screencast is a little movie you create on your Mac or PC, of what you see on your computer screen, and what you say, and then share online so others can watch. It’s the ideal way to explain things when words just won’t do, or you don’t feel like typing a novel trying to.

Let’s face it, whether it’s for our professional or personal lives, we all spend a ton of time online and much of that time is spent communicating with others, or trying our best to. With Jing we know you’ll be able to communicate more clearly, probably faster, and have a lot of fun in the process.

So go ahead, download Jing and inform, entertain, explain, educate, and even rant. Just be sure to tell us what you think, or how you’re using it. We’d love to hear your story!

Here it is. The 7th Jing Project release in 6 months. Tony previously hinted what we were going to release with version 1.4. Now it's available to all of you. Here is a list of what's new:

• Share to FTP
• Both videos and images can be shared via standard FTP
• The share and embed strings that are put on the clipboard can be customized
• Share images to Flickr
• Existing Flickr users can have image captures sent directly to their account
• Streamlined sharing to File
• You can now share quickly to your chosen directory with one button press
• The share and embed strings that are put on the clipboard can be customized
• Usage reporting to help improve Jing
• This is anonymous and optional
• We use this to gather statistics about how these sharing methods are used
• This lets us figure out where the Jing Project is headed

As always, it is available for both the Mac and Windows.

Ever find one of those blogs where you learn something new in every post? Well, for me, that's Beth Kanter's blog.

I was so happy to see one of her recent posts here. Beth recently made a screencast with her 8 year old son, Harry, I love how Beth describes the screencast as a digital scrapbook to document what kids learn. Check out the screencast here It's a quick screencast running just over 3:30 minutes.

How are you using Jing? What are you documenting?

AJ Morris works in TechSmith’s Tech Support department and often uses Jing when helping customers. One day he was showing me some examples of the Jings he’s made and we came across this one.

“How did you get so many images in one capture?” I asked. “How did you capture the mouse cursor?”

“Huh?” AJ replied. “It’s not a big deal. I’ll just show you.”

AJ showed me indeed, and core to this example is the use of the Hotkey. It lets you keep the mouse in focus while still launching Jing. Now, I will attempt to show you. Some of you may already be using Jing this way, but it was new to me! I especially like how this strategy could be used for times when you need to print out a quick guide or short reference.

How AJ set the stage. (0:35, audio required)
Capturing and annotating the image. (0:55, audio required) Since I couldn’t easily use Jing to record a Jing annotation, I used Camtasia Studio 5 for the second part of this workflow example.

Written Steps:
Step 1: Clear off your [computer] desktop. If this is hopeless, open a word processor and view a blank document in full screen mode to create a clean background.

Step 2: Open the software you are attempting to explain.

Step 3: Click the necessary tabs, pull-down menus and pop up windows. Arrange the windows side-by-side in a sequential manner.

Step 4: Launch Jing and capture the image using the Hotkey. Annotate as necessary.

Step 5: Share!

...Well, hopefully exactly what you've been asking for. Our initial quest with Jing was to streamline all of the complexities involved in sharing digital media via your daily electronic conversations. We were able to do that because we had touch points on both the content creation side (with Jing) as well as the content delivery side (with Screencast.com).

While we achieved that goal technically, we learned from all of you that sharing has a much broader definition than just to Screencast.com. So, in past several weeks, we've taken your feedback to heart and have been working on some enhancements to Jing that we hope will address some of your needs...

Our hope is that you are able to expand how you might use Jing with new options for sharing directly to your private server via FTP, to a public service like Flickr or even to your local hard drive or corporate network via the "File" option.

We know this doesn't cover every sharing scenario, but we're on our way and your feedback will be crucial to continue that journey. So, what do you think?

Oh, when do you get this, you ask? Well... ...hmm, "before the snow flies as they say here in Michigan" :-)

Well, it happened again, and I know I shouldn’t take it personally. Someone recently found out I worked for TechSmith, and said something like, “SnagIt right? I don’t get it. I mean I have Print Screen.”

Now, this post is between Jing and the Print Screen key. For now, I’ll leave SnagIt and its batch conversion, Flash hotspots, edge effects, multitude of file formats, text, callouts, spotlight effects, scrolling window capture-that-keeps-hyperlinks-intact—out of this. Instead, I’ll take a deep breath and save it for my therapist.

My goal in video below is to clearly demonstrate the change in workflow when trying to share an annotated screen image with another human being. I really don’t have anything against the Prnt Scrn key, and in fact, the built-in screen capture on the Mac is fairly robust if you know the key combos. The key qualifiers to this demonstration are the sharing and the annotation.

I hope you enjoy the videos, and I leave you with one disclaimer. Since you can’t record using Jing with Jing, I used Camtasia Studio 5 to record my Jing workflow. Having audio for the following two examples would be beneficial, as I try to narrate the workflow.

Sharing an annotated image without Jing: (2:02, many steps)
Using Jing to share an annotated image: (1:03, few steps)