Toward the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the world saw an onslaught of software that rhymed with "ring".

There's Ping, Jing, Bing, and Ning.

By about this time period all the [noun].com's had been taken, as had most of the cute smerging of two words to make one. (Looking at you TechSmith and Snagit, formerly known as SnagIt!) By the fall of 2010, it was clearly the age of inventing new words that made no real sense on their own.

So we'll give a big virtual high-five to whoever is the first to list the above four -ings in chronological order from earliest to most recent. The catch is the date has to be when the public release of the software came out with the official name. So for example Bing couldn't be thought of as "MSN Search". Bing would be Bing--when the public could Bing instead of Google.

Note: Jing Pro is no longer available for purchase. Learn more.

I thought it would be helpful if I created a sort of FAQ about SWF--the video format used in the free version of Jing. If you have more questions, post them in the comments and I'll update this post.

What is SWF?
It stands for Shockwave Flash, and maybe you've heard of Adobe Flash Player or played some Flash-based online games. It's a file type intended to deliver a compact file size containing multimedia content to the web.

What are strengths of SWF?
As it pertains to Jing:

• It works great for web delivery, and we thought primarily people would use Jing to communicate via Internet-related tools
• It's available for Mac and PC
• It's royalty-free (obviously a big plus for a free product)
• It's lossless--meaning that you get really crisp and pixel-perfect screen capture capability.

What are some weakness of SWF?
As it pertains to Jing:

• It's not a true video format. This means hardly any video editors will touch it, and when a lot of people double-click the file, their computer doesn't know what to do with it...people have to know to put the file in a web-browser. (Learn how to automate this.)
• It's not good at capturing high-motion content. In other words, it does a lot better capturing your typical computer programs than a video game or, ahem--online video.

Can I resize my SWF video so it fits better in my blog or website?
You sure can. I recommend reading this post.

So what might the MP4 (technically, MPEG-4 h.264 AVC) format offered by Jing Pro mean to me?
In short,

• It's better at capturing motion.
• It's generally editable in third-party applications.
• It's usually a smaller file size.
• It's a standard video format--works on any number of sites that support video.
• It's playable outside of a web browser. In other words, people can just double-click the file and generally have a great experience. Double-clicking a SWF file is generally unsuccessful because it requires a browser to play it.

You can learn more here and see some side-by-side comparisons of the differences here.

This is so true. Some observations and wisdom via Twitter:

How many bookmarking and sharing sites do we need again? http://www.screencast.com/t/OWM0YjI2NTkt @charris1980

On August 24th, not only did a new version of Jing come out, but the Jing Help Center was migrated over to TechSmith's Learning Center to hang out with our other help resources.

I thought people might be especially interested in the new FAQ topic. I coalesced thousands of pieces of data--from YOU--and made a comprehensive FAQ list.

See what you think, and send me feedback on what you'd like me to add.

Here's the FAQ topic

I have no idea what this means, but apparently the mere mention of bacon was enough for me to click on this tweet from Jing. Even better, someone thought it was worthy of capturing and sharing with their followers.

Hmmm, I'm not in marketing, but maybe there is something to be learned here? "Jing, now with optional bacon theme..." No?

Congratulations Hanes, your banner ad sparked my interest because of the copy "Avoid Bacon Neck" http://bit.ly/clyj6u (via @colinmurphy) @jessebrightman

David, one of the Web Designers here at TechSmith, shared a creative and time-saving tip with me and I wanted to share. He set up his Mac so that in one click, Jing images automatically open in Photoshop.

The problem he had was he often captures things off his screen with Jing but needs to edit or enhance the images in Photoshop.

The typical workflow is capture, save, tab to Photoshop, open, then navigate to file. It works, but it's a lot of clicks. "Surely there's a better way," thought David.

David utilized Jing's ability to automatically save to a specific destination combined with a little magic from Automator (which is built into the Mac OS). Now, he just clicks the save button, and the image is instantly sent to a designated folder. Meanwhile, Photoshop monitors the folder and opens anything that's in the folder. Neat!

David made an informal video (4:15) showing the process.

For almost a year, TechSmith has been undergoing some renovations and moving people around in phases so the various departments can be closer together in the same office park.

Last Friday we had a Open House and BBQ to celebrate the conclusion of this process. Families came and we had over a dozen activities--from eating Sno-cones to making your own slime. As you can imagine, all the little kids want to work where mommy or daddy does when they grow up.

The highlight though--for children and adults alike--was the 22 ft inflatable slide! Watch the video below to see Captain Jing almost break the sound barrier. The good news it will only waste 10 seconds of your life.

Want to share this 10-seconds of speed with someone? http://bit.ly/cGz0Mn

Unfortunately the slide isn't a permanent thing, and we don't typically drink beer or wine at work, but nonetheless, we have some job openings you or someone you know might be interested in.

Thanks to: DJ Rachael (whose day job is working here in PR), Impression 5 Science Center, Merindorf Meats, Potter Park Zoo, Ultimate Bounce Inflatables, and Touch Audio and Media.

Some folks at TechSmith are putting on a tech show of sorts. You can watch it live or on our YouTube channel after the fact.

We're calling it The Forge...see TechSmith--smith, as a play on blacksmith, which uses a forge, for tech...

Well, the first episode is today at 2 pm Eastern time (GMT -5:00). We've got Jon Udell lined up to talk about Screencasting, a microphone review, and it's live so who knows what will happen?

Learn all about it on the Visual Lounge.