Hi Everyone - I'm Dave McCollom, the Education Evangelist here at TechSmith. Long time lurker here, first time poster. We just launched a brand new blog and have added a new page of great resources for educators that are using all TechSmith products (including Jing of course). We already have some Jing content up and will be adding more in the near future. I encourage you to take a look around and let us know what you think.

Education Community Site

Screencast Tour of Community Site (also embedded in the first post on the Education Blog)

Education Blog

If you want to check out the new content where Jing is specifically featured:

Introduction to Screen Capture in Education

Students Demonstrate Understanding via Video

Provide Thorough and Personalized Feedback to Students

Capture Instructional Content for Additional Student Practice

Thanks for taking a second to check things out. If any of you educators out there have any Jing content and/or stories that you'd like to share please let me know! This blog is meant to be about you!

One of our users, Julia Brewster, was having some issues with embedding Jing Videos on her Wordpress.com blog. Instead of displaying her video, nothing would show up. Quite frustrating, if you ask me.

Fortunately, she went out to the WordPress.com forums, posted her problem, and with some help from the community, she quickly found the solution: The Vodpod Button.

With this button, you can post just about any video to your WordPress.com blog, including your Jing videos hosted on Screencast.com. This works for Jing and Jing Pro, and it's quite easy.

Here is how:

1. Create a Screencast.com Output Button in Jing that returns Embed Code instead of the URL.
2. Add the VodPod Extension to your Browser (should work with most major browsers).
3. Record your video with Jing, and share it using the newly created Screencast.com Embed Code Output Button. This will copy the Embed Code to your Clipboard.
4. Click on the Vodpod Button. This dialog will appear:
   
5. Paste the Embed Code in the Embed Code field.
6. Enter your Wordpress.com Login Information.
7. Enter the Post Details (Title, Body etc.)
8. Publish your post, or choose 'Send to blog editor' to further edit your blog post. Then publish it.
9. Your Video will now be embedded on your blog and people can easily watch it.

For those of you who'd like to see the Vodpod button in action, watch this video:

So as you can see, adding Jing videos to your blog can be quite easy. I hope to see more and more embedded Jing videos on Wordpress.com blogs.
Do you have a good example? We'd love to see it - share it in the comment section!

The mystery has been solved! Some Windows XP users have Jing setup to launch when the computer starts, but Jing doesn't. They've had to manually launch Jing from the Start menu. While not the end of the world, it's sure annoying.

Well Mark and Fatih did some detective work and fixed it. It had to do with a goofy way XP was inserting a space in some path during the install. One little space...

We're not going to force an update, but if you want to grab the latest Jing, re-download and install it from: http://www.jingproject.com. The only thing different in this Jing from yours is that Jing will now respect our dear Windows XP users and start up upon launch like you told it too.

Happy Jinging!

Want to put some sweet-looking screencasts up on YouTube? It's easier than ever, and Brooks shows you how. (See outline of steps below video.) In Brooks' last post I gave him a hard time about that face close-up. I mean, people are trying to learn stuff here! The good news is that Brooks took efforts to make his intros a little more bearable. Did it work? You be the judge.

I also made a convenient PDF (less than 2 pages) with all the steps too.

Overview:

1. You need Jing Pro, and a YouTube account.
2. Create a YouTube button in Jing.
3. Record a video in 16:9 aspect ratio (Hold Shift while selecting area) at 1280 x 720 dimensions.
4. Upload to YouTube, and wait while your video is processed!

Update 12:40 pm, 11-June-09:

Tech Support has been receiving a number of calls from people experiencing Jing crashes on start up. We have confirmed and can reproduce the error and want to share what we know at this time.

This seems to be a Tiger-only issue at this time. We know this is affecting Mac OS 10.4.11. It may affect more versions of Tiger.

Users are having some success with Jing if they disconnect from the Internet, then restart Jing.

Fixing this issue is our top priority and we are currently investigating leads. We will update this post with new information as we get it.

About two months ago, we asked for your feedback about how the new snap to region/aspect ratio should work.

The core internal debate was whether we should show all available dimensions at once or just the next closest dimension. 97 people told us something, but by the time we had to lock down the decision, it was slightly in favor of Prototype A--show one region at a time.

However a number of people asked for both.

Ok, fair enough. :) So here's how it panned out. On the Mac, we got it in. You can display one dimension (default) or ALSO hold the alt/option key if you want to see all available dimensions. Windows doesn't have this ability yet, but we'll get it in there. (Tempting to blame the intern, but that wouldn't be fair or true.) For now, think of this little option on the Mac as something of an Easter egg.

Now, on to working on the next Jing release! If we start another food fight in the lunch room debating the "right way" to do something we'll be sure to ask for your feedback again!

Cross posted from The Visual Lounge

And, we're off! The Jing Speed Series has started! Can we pull off 6 Jing Screencasts in 60 minutes? We will find out!

Up first, we have David Moulton, Senior Web Designer, shows me how to turn an unused button on your mouse and making it a hotkey for Jing. Makes captures fast! You can see the Jingcast here. By the way, he made our cool Jing Speed Series graphic you see in this post.

Jing Lead Developer, Bill Scanlon and Katie Lewis, the Product Marketing Manager, will be going over what's new in Jing. You can see the Jingcast here

Katie and Mike Curtis, Information Developer, go over an easter egg in the latest version of Jing on the Mac giving you the ability to display all of your easy region selection options. You can see the Jingcast here

Training Manager, Matt Pierce, and Tech Support Engineer, Casey Phear, go over how to move the Jing sun and using it with a hot key. You can see the Jingcast here.

Matt Pierce and Instructional Designer, Chris McQueen, go over how to use Jing with Snagit and Camtasia Studio. You can see the Jingcast about using Jing with Snagit here and the Jingcast about using Jing with Camtasia Studio here.

And, lastly, Mike Curtis, Information Developer, and Katie go over demystifying embed code and the value of the new Screencast.com folders. You can see the Jingcast here.

If you'd like to tune in live, you can watch here on Ustream.tv here

Note: Well, we actually made 6 screencasts in 60 minutes with Jing, but found out we had audio issues (as in no audio) on 2 of our videos. So, we had to re-record them! Always something! :-) Thanks for tuning in!

Now Starring You!

If you've plunked down the pocket change for Jing Pro, get ready to witness a whole new way to communicate visually--by taking advantage of our new webcam integration! Now you can provide a quick "in person" intro to your videos, send "video postcards" to your kids away at school, or even show off your latest big purchase to your friends by recording with your webcam.

Don't worry if you haven't scrounged up the $15 bucks for Jing Pro, all Jing users are getting some cool enhancements today, like:

Easy Region Selection

By holding down the Ctrl or Shift while selecting your area to record, your selector will maintain standard aspect ratios of 4:3 or 16:9 for widescreen. The easy region selection lets you choose any dimension you want while locked to the set aspect ratio. OR if you want, you can snap to a standard present dimension such as 320x240 or 640x480, etc.

Output to Snagit and Camtasia Studio

For more advanced editing and production options, Windows users can now take your Jing screen capture and recordings straight to our more advanced TechSmith tools, "Snagit":http://www.techsmith.com/snagit.asp and "Camtasia Studio":http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp. No worries if you don't own a license. You can try them both free for 30 days.