Maxwell Scott-Slade sent us an email about a Wicked Cool way he's using Jing. He wrote: "You can see my Jing website here: llllost.com where I use Jing with my own code to make it an image blog." We had to know more, so we asked...and Maxwell dished the details. (Disclaimer: If you wind up vaporizing a few hours playing Attak or HighSpeedChase ...don't come crying to us!)   —Daniel Foster, newsletter editor

What's Johnny Two Shoes and who visits your image blog at llllost.com?

JohnnyTwoShoes is an independent games company I run (now full time!) with my brother Josh and girlfriend Sarah. We use llllost and Jing to relay ideas and keep a global history of what's happening—we only show the latest 30 posts to the public at the moment.

Currently llllost is visited by die hard JohnnyTwoShoes fans and ourselves. We've tried to keep it a little quiet.

Why did you start using Jing? What problem were you trying to solve?

I was using Apple OSX a lot at work; I loved the fact that I could copy a portion of the screen to clipboard and used to paste to iChat a lot to demonstrate ideas to co-workers. I work primarily with web design and development so to be able to show stuff visually is an amazing asset.

Then, I thought why can't I do this on my PC? I was actually exploring ways to write my own version for PC and I thought it would be great to upload images to an FTP server afterwards if people can't accept file transfers. I was so relieved to find someone beat me to it and added a lot of things I hadn't thought of!

Now I use Jing on PC and on Mac.

How are you using Jing for llllost.com?

When you're just too busy, a blog is a real chore. With images you can just "jing" what you need of your screenspace to capture that portion of an idea.

I guess llllost has evolved from there now. We like to keep snippets of our progress which also acts as a preview (or teaser) for users of our games site JohnnyTwoShoes. Jing lets us all have a little say about what's happening without actually ever typing a word more than the title.

How have you configured Jing? You mentioned that you're using it with some custom code you've written...

Jing is configured to upload to a folder on my FTP server. After that, a PHP script (that I originally wrote in a lunch break at work, using the CodeIgniter PHP framework) takes the uploads, makes a little thumbnail version and sticks it into a database. It's all cached so it's super quick as well.

The website does all the work, all we have to do is grab a portion of the screen and press "share"—it's online. Also made it output an RSS feed so I can see what's going on without being there.

What do you like most about using Jing?

Jing lets me communicate ideas much faster. It's hard to be confused when you've got something to look at straight away. I also like that I could add something to the process by making my own functionality on the remote server.

Have your own cool use for Jing? Leave a comment or drop us a line.