Cross posted from The Visual Lounge Blog

I 'met' Chris Petescia, the VP & Director of User Experience at Carrot Creative, on Twitter when he was talking about Jing. I don't think I've heard from anyone using Jing more than Chris and in some very creative ways including creating a whole site dedicated to something he calls 'Jing Art'! I love all the different ways he and Carrot Creative are using Jing and I had to share that with you!

I sent Chris some questions and here's what he shared with me...

1. How have screenshots and screencasts changed your own communication at Carrot Creative for the better?

Shortly before we stumbled across JingProject.com (the debate rages on here as to who gets credit and whether it was guidance from an Obi-wan at Hoth-like spirit vision, or just plain luck), we used another (now defunct) screenshot-to-web service. While the ingenuity of auto-uploading any screenshot taken- to a URL & clipboard- amazed us, we soon learned there was a far more vastly-featured and elegant tool to do this and more: Jing. The day we installed Jing was for Carrot, the day we landed in Oz and opened the door into so much vibrant possibility. We'd been living in the dark ages and didn't know it until then... one click onto the yellow Brick Road pop-bubble and there was no looking back. Jing immediately became valuable to us in all departments, especially to me with frequent travel and need to review/ communicate/ share visual ideas at odd times. iChat screen share never really worked anyway, so Jing made sharing easier across all needs, particularly those we hadn't previously identified.

2. Are your screenshots used internally or externally? What is the viewer response to them?

We use Jing internally, externally and if there was a third option, that way too. Internally we share anything from financial notes among my partners and I to notes on mockups and code/CSS bugs during project QA... and of course humor (see: JingArt.us). Externally, it has quickly become a favorite way for us to communicate with clients during all steps of a process. Some clients are very hands on and involved: regular walkthroughs with screencast videos (including voice notes throughout) allow us to demonstrate and clarify. There is very little confusion regarding client perception and expectation of a project, when we can walk them through a workflow or design. Many of these clients have adopted Jing to communicate back to us as well, and with their other persuist I'm sure, as is the case with our friends at MLB.com. Other clients are only involved where milestones of a project are concerned, but for them Jing is a great way for us to send individual screens and video overviews. We use it to demonstrate usage and get feedback about their experiences before launch. Additionally, Jing is a great tool for reporting analytics and data to clients. Whether for a formal weekly report or just to illustrate user engagement on their site, page or social feed, Jing does it for us.

3. What do you use Jing for primarily

Because we use Jing daily for so many things, I actually had to check my Jing "History" to get perspective on where it is used most. As the head of our design and production team, my History is flooded with design mocks: my review thoughts on our team's work with suggestions, as well as my own design work with video or text notes and questions to get feedback and guidance for our developers as they build it. Jing has smoothed this entire process of design concept to tweaking to producing to reviewing production.

4. Anything else we should know? How did the idea for Jing Art come about?

Aside from the day-to-day work of a digital agency and production shop, Jing has been useful for the unplanned pitfalls that come with our field: Photoshop or Illustrator locking up or most recently a plague of sporadic crashes that Snow Leopard has blessed us with. In these times, Jing has more than once allowed us to quickly grab a screenshot as the pinwheel of death spins it's cheery and spiteful rainbow, signifying an impending crash. If nothing else, we get a reference copy via quick Jing'ing to refer to as we re-build (:grumble:) Jing Art came about by chance, as one of our creatives was taking a web-browsing (info snacking, we call it) break and came across a photo of a Russian Developer... or, as our Creative saw it, a potential Jing-Jedi Knight. One Jing arrow added to his perfectly posed hands and internal Jing humor was born at Carrot Creative. While we certainly don't mock clients by any means, the variety of projects and circumstances we deal with allows us to laugh and enjoy our jobs a lot, and Jing has become an integral part of sharing that among ourselves. I think there was one day when we were Jing'ing one another's Jings and adding comments until it just got out of control :)

Chris Petescia is a co-founder of Carrot Creative, located in the Digital District of DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY. Chris works as a mix of Art Director and Designer, focusing on the User Experience side of Carrot's projects. He is enthusiastic about Star Wars, gets excited about pixels and enjoys a good lolcat photo as much as the next web geek. When he's not attending a live show at one of NYC's numerous music venues, you'll find him scrabbling to last.fm/dmbpride, posting to chrispetescia.tumblr.com or tweeting from twitter.com/chrispetescia

I was also lucky enough to meet Mike Germano, the President of Carrot Creative at the Blog World Expo and he shared with me how they are using Jing at Carrot Creative. The video runs less than 2 minutes. See why Mike is 'mad' at his team for using Jing! Quite the funny story!

Big thanks to Carrot Creative for sharing with us how they're using Jing.

I hope you'll submit to Carrot Creative some Jing Art of your own! Here is the Jing Art I'm going to submit. What do you think?

Jing SWF videos (the only type of video available in the free version of Jing) is optimized for viewing on the Web. You make a video, send a link to the video and people click the link and watch your video.

However, maybe you want to save SWF videos to your computer. If you double-click a Jing-created SWF to open it, there's a good chance your computer won't know what to do with it...and you might get a dialog like this:

Now just because your computer might not know what to do with the SWF doesn't mean you can't "teach" it.

Important: All SWFs are not the same. Some, like Jing's are videos with the controls attached to the bottom. But SWFs shouldn't be assumed to be a video format--it's really a Flash application. For example there are any number of SWF games people play on the web, so please be careful if you start trying to open non-Jing SWFs as described below.

There are two main ways to open Jing SWF videos on your computer.

The first is the simplest and done on a per-file basis. Open your favorite web browser, then click and drag the SWF file into the browser window. The Jing SWF will play in the browser. You may need to resize your browser depending on the size of the video.

You can also associate the .swf file extension with your favorite browser. This is a more long term solution as your browser will attempt to open any and all SWF files when double clicked.

• For Vista
• For XP
• For Mac OS 10.5

To do so using Windows Vista:

1. Right click the SWF file.
2. Choose Open With
3. Click Choose Default Program...
4. The goal is to associate your favorite web browser with this file type. It is unlikely a browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox will appear in Recommended programs. If your browser appears in the recommended programs, select it. Make sure Always use the selected program to open this kind of file is checked. Click OK. If your browser does not appear in Recommended programs, click the Browse button.
5. Navigate and select your desired browser. The file you are looking for will likely be in a subfolder of the Program Files directory. It will be an .exe file. For example Firefox.exe or iexplore.exe and should have a familiar-looking icon.
6. Make sure Always use the selected program to open this kind of file is checked. Click OK.

Now, when you double click a SWF file, it will open in your associated browser.

To do so using Windows XP:

1. Right click the SWF file.
2. Choose Open With...
3. The goal is to associate your favorite web browser with this file type. A browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox might not appear under Choose the program you want to use to open this file dialog. If not, check Always use the selected program to open this kind of file then click the Browse button.
4. Navigate and select your desired browser. The file you are looking for will likely be in a subfolder of the Program Files directory. It will be an .exe file. For example Firefox.exe or iexplore.exe and should have a familiar-looking icon.
5. Click Open.

Now, when you double click a SWF file, it will open in your associated browser.

To do so on Mac OS 10.5:

1. Right click the SWF file.
2. Choose Open With.
3. Click Other...
4. Select the desired browser, most likely from your Applications folder.
5. Check Always Open With.
6. Click Open.

Now, when you double click a SWF file, it will open in your associated browser.

Cross posted from The Visual Lounge Blog

Sometimes words are not enough! Especially when you only have 140 characters on Twitter. Soon, you'll be able to easily add visuals and screencasts to Twitter with the click of a button in Jing!

There will be a Jing update on December 8 that will give you a fast and easy way to add your Jing screen captures and screencasts to Twitter!

How will it work? Simple! Set up a new Share button in Jing for Twitter.

Just as always, you will capture an image or make a video of your desktop

Share your capture by selecting the 'Twitter' button. A box will automatically pop up and you can create your tweet in the text box. Jing will post your tweet along with a link to your Jing screen capture or screencast.

That's it! Tweet away!

And, best of all, the price is right. This new feature is free to all Jing users! On December 8, Jing should alert you that there is a new update available. Update Jing and you should be ready to start tweeting your screen captures and Jing-casts!

Can't wait to see what you create! Jing me @betsyweber or @techsmith. Or, be sure to follow @jingtips for the latest tips and tricks all about Jing!

Let's say you've got a blog, website or maybe a wiki that supports embedded video. Dilemma: If you embed the video at full size, it'll take up your whole site. Or worse, it overflows your site like shown here. Yet if you record a small video, people will have a hard time seeing anything useful. Plus you might often want consistency such that all your videos are the same size initially.

In this post I'm going to show you how you can record full screen (or whatever size you want) and then present your video at a more reduced size. Viewers have the option of watching the video as is, or they can click the full screen button to enjoy your original dimensions.

I listed the steps below, but I also made a Jing video (2:30) where I show my process. Please ignore the fact I show four locations to change the size. Recently updated code just has three. The idea is exactly the same.

1. In Jing, make a new button that returns Screencast.com embed code. That's explained in detail here.
2. Next, make one of your stellar Jing videos. You can make it as large as you want.
3. When you're done with the video, click Stop and click your Screencast.com embed code button.
4. Now, paste the embed code into your blog, webpage, wiki, etc. Preview it. Is the video ginormus? We can fix that.
5. This next part gets a little into some math, but it's not bad. Get a piece of scratch paper and write down the height of your video over the width. You can see where to find the dimensions in this example.
6. Now, the key here is scaling the video but keeping the same aspect ratio. If you just lop off some arbitrary number of pixels from height and width it's possible your video will look cropped or squashed. You can reduce the height and width by multiplying the same percentage or, if you want to bust out some old school math dust off your cross multiplication skills. What's great about cross multiplication is that you can precisely define your desired width and the height will fall into place for you. Remember, once you get your new dimensions you must update the height in 3 locations in the code as well as the width.
7. That's it! Your video will be gracefully embedded at your specified dimensions and viewers have the luxury of viewing the original dimensions if they want!

Parting notes:

• This works for SWF and MPEG-4 video format. (Free and Pro versions). Recommended: Use Jing to upload your video and return the code. There is currently an issue where SWF videos put on Screencast.com manually may not scale appropriately. We believe we have a fix poised to be implemented.
• If I know I'm making a video I care about, I will usually hold Shift as I make the selection and then snap to 1280x720. I don't have to do any math because I just reduce each dimension by half and arrive at the popular and friendly size of 640x360. You can learn more about that on Brooks' YouTube in HD How-to video.
• Yeah, I probably should have made my example more extreme in that I recorded awfully close to 1280x720.

Let us know if this was helpful and understandable. Thanks!

There's lots of ways to learn things. Some people like visual, some like hands-on. Some like to read. How would you explain how Jing works to someone? We talk about fast visual communication, but what does that really mean?

What would be a different way to try and explain Jing? Do you think this video get the idea across? Would you be willing to send it on and help explain to others how Jing works?

Have you ever noticed tremendous file size variation with your videos? This is by far more common with the Flash SWF video format that is used in the free version of Jing, and it probably has to do with how much motion you're recording on the screen.

SWF is great in many ways because it's really great for the Web, captures pixel-perfect quality, and is royalty free to use. However it's not so good in that hardly any program can edit or convert it, has a frame limit, and it's not so good at capturing hi-motion content.

If you record something like a video game or web cam with the SWF video format, your file size will explode. In addition, it might start dropping frames leading to a "jerkier" video. MPEG-4 will provide a much better video.

Here's a lot more information and some side-by-side comparisons so you can see for yourself the difference in both the quality and file size of the videos.

Woah! We just found the very first Jing demo video we ever made. Anyone out there remember that interface? You'll have to click the video twice to get it to start playing.

Music: Kevin MacLeod

It's fun looking back sometimes...but not as fun as looking forward!

I thought I would go through the 'ol Feedback Email bag and pull out a few questions that seem to pop up now and again. I've tried to answer these awesome Jingers individually, but I'm guessing if people are taking the time to write us, there's probably a lot more of you out there with similar questions.

System Audio Recording

Jing is optimized for recording narration using a microphone. Jing detects and uses the default audio input device (which is usually the microphone). That said, people are going to want to record system audio (the computer sound or sound that comes out of your speakers.) You may be able to do it, but the key is changing the default audio input device. This may not be supported on all Vista machines. Check out this article for starters, and note at the bottom there is additional help for both Mac and Windows. This article was written for Camtasia Studio, but is equally applicable to Jing. It goes into a lot more troubleshooting and work-arounds, especially for Vista.

Selecting a Capture Size

We don't exactly go out of our way to expose it, but if you click and drag a selection while holding the Shift or Control key you can get a 16:9 (widescreen) or 4:3 (standard) aspect ratio that "snaps" to popular dimensions. Dimensions are important if you want high quality YouTube screencasts or want consistency on your blog or website.

Remember Where I Saved it Last Time!

Sorry, it should work the right way, but it's a Jing Windows bug that is fixed in the next release. However, this is a good opportunity to mention that you can setup a custom Save button to automatically to a particular location--even a network drive. Here's how to do it.

We shared Marc's Jing story last week. It's neat to see how people use Jing and often learn about a new application, in this case JiWire.

We were wondering if anyone out there would be willing to share their Jing stories with us--and more importantly--the Web. We have dual motives. We really want to understand how people are using Jing, and how it is and isn't quite meeting their ideal needs. This helps us prioritize and make Jing better. Sometimes we are exposed to ideas we've never even thought of.
Our second goal is to spread creative uses to the masses. People use Jing in ways others never consider. (Like using a webcam to share an image that's not on your computer.)

Do you have a story to share?

We are specifically looking for stories involving:

• Strategies for recording system audio (the sound from your computer speakers) with Jing.
• Using embed code for some purpose.
• Using Jing in educational settings, especially student use of Jing.
• Using Jing for business purposes.
• Examples of how Jing increased productivity in the workplace.
• Funny uses of Jing.

And even if you don't tell us your story, we hope you'll tell a person you know. We thank everyone who spreads the word.