Our Interactive "Simulation" of Jing
In February we posted a draft of a tutorial we were working on. Well, it's done and it shipped with the latest Jing update. (The old one is here.)
In this post I want to:
- direct you to the final version
- acknowledge and respond to some feedback we've received.
The tutorial lives in two places. It shows up if you're a new user and install Jing on a computer for the first time. (That's why you may not have seen it.) It's also on the Jing Help Center. We hope you'll pass it on to your friends that might not be familiar with Jing.
Now, on to your great feedback:
Jing isn't a "traditional" application and we know from observing new users and other sources that a lot of people don't find the sun and don't "get" sharing the link to their content with others. We strove to address these two issues with the interactive tutorial.
We received a number of comments like this one posted on the blog. "The fact that you are sharing an image of a map from a browser window seems to be an odd choice to me. Most users would just paste the URL."
It's a fair point. In fact originally we had a graph in there, and we thought...that's kind of stupid. People would just email the Excel doc. We liked the comments about maybe adding a step to annotate the map which would have helped make it a better example, but inserting that step in the Flash project at that point would have been a tall order. Plus, we really wanted to focus on the location of the "Sun" and the getting of the link." I can imagine that in Tutorial 2.0 we'll have a better example.
"Paste with Command-V? Is that a Mac thing? I always use control-V."
We only posted the Mac version at the time and initially we were planning to make platform-specific tweaks only to the location of the Sun and the pasting instructions. However, we love our Mac and Windows people so if you look closely you'll see that the sample "webpage" is in Safari on the Mac version in addition to the sample graphics at the end of the tutorial.
There is no way to get to the tutorial from within Jing
Errr, yeah, that's true. We wanted to find a way to make it easy so that if you skipped it or wanted to do it again later, you could do it from within Jing...but that didn't make it. We'll get it in there in the next release or two.
Please keep the feedback coming! We read every single one, and try to respond to as many as we can.
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Nice interactive simulation...what was this done with?
Hi John,
It was done in Flash but the images were created using a variety of tools including Snagit. This company from Grand Rapids, MI helped us with the Flash interactivity. http://www.innereactive.com/
Thanks for the feedback!
Mike Curtis, TechSmith
Hey! That's my feedback! (That wasn't used :) )
It's a great demo guys. It's really well done and it gives a good idea for a new user what they *can* do even if they may never to that exact thing.
The other day I went through three email exchanges trying to show someone that the directions they gave were full of failjuice before I took a short video going through their steps. Their next email resolved the issue. :)
Thanks!
Hey Aaron,
Thanks for the feedback!
Failjuice, hehehe... I'ma have to use that one. I've heard failpants, big ball of fail, weaksauce, weakpants, etc etc... but failjuice - that has a really nice ring to it. :)
Alan Dennis, TechSmith
Hey Jing is great, the only thing i that if something goes full screen it gets all glitchy. Also the recording bar is in the movie which is annoying.
Great idea, great need for this type of thing. However, after installing the application and finding I am forced to create an online account, I am a bit reluctant to continue. None the less, I have created an account so I can test this an see if it meets my needs because I am always trying to find good ways to demonstrate onscreen actions. However, I created a very basic screenshot, and sent it to my self, as a test.
But I can't look at it, or am I missing something. To share this with someone, they have to have an account also?
They may not want another account, if like a lot of people they already have many accounts.
Hi Ray,
You just need an account to create Jings. Anyone you send them to can see them even if they don't have an account.
Mike Curtis, TechSmith
It's a great demo guys. It's really well done and it gives a good idea for a new user what they *can* do even if they may never to that exact thing.
Here is my problem, I installed Jing on my netbook but my screen is too small to click on the "go to sign up" button. Does Jing have screen size limitations or is there another way I can get it activated?
Hello Sarah,
Your timing is almost spooky. I was just putting the finishing touches on a post related to your issue. We've come up with a work-around that will get you back in action with Jing.
http://blog.jingproject.com/2010/05/a-bug-for-netbook-users.html
Mike Curtis, TechSmith
Great, thanks for the quick response. I saved the xml file in the Jing folder and have it up and running.
I like the demo and it help me to better understand how to use the product. I even tried to crash the demo, to see how the error functions worked and the demo had a nice recovery and did not crash. Good job and I hope you create more demos as you add to the product.
i'm getting stuck on the last page of the Tutorial when it says "Sign up and start Jing" with an arrow that points to nothing. I tried re-installing (selected the "repair" option) and creating an account on Screencast.com, but still having the same problem. June 2010
Hello Liz,
Sorry about that.
Please check out this bug description and workaround and see if it will get you into Jing.
Sorry for the inconvenience--we're working on a fix for that.
http://blog.jingproject.com/2010/05/a-bug-for-netbook-users.html
Sincerely,
Mike Curtis
Information Development, TechSmith
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