Jing's going beyond screen capture and into the realm of gourds apparently!

We had an internal pumpkin carving contest here at TechSmith and check out the winner! I just wish I had thought of this. Congrats to team Moore Cowbell!

In this post I want to give you a little behind-the-scenes update about what's been happening on the Mac side. Later, I'll do Windows.

Otto, our Mac dev, has been up to his eyeballs in deep-level code. His mission? Make Jing smaller, use less CPU, and squash a few little bugs that are annoying but not annoying enough to make the effort to contact Tech Support.

Here's a run down of what Otto's been working on. Note that it's not released publicly yet:

• If you took a capture with Jing but canceled it, Jing would still consume CPU. Now, if you're not actively using Jing it will idle at 0.0% or very very close to 0. Nice!

• Completed switch to libcurl (or cURL). This has to do with the way Mac Jing implements FTP. Results? A better SFTP solution and Jing is about 1 MB smaller--down to a sleek 5.6 MB.
• Has this ever happened to you? You use a hotkey to initiate a capture and when you click and drag, instead of selecting a region it grabs the whole window and moves the selection area? Not a big deal right? Just cancel...it always works the second time... But no! It's kind of annoying and Otto fixed that too.
• Finally, have you ever made a selection, but had no crosshairs? It still works, just odd that there's no crosshairs. Well, that should be fixed too.

Everyone who has given feedback about performance issues should know that the team has been rolling up their sleeves and making improvements. Most people will never notice or appreciate them, however, it's those small things that can really add up to create a faster, more consistent, and pleasurable experience.

Once we wrap up these "under the hood improvements" and complete our testing, we'll start work on a new cool feature and ship it. Now, that's going to take a while but does it sound like a plan?

Recording a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation is easy right? Just launch your presentation and record. Well...you probably could do that, but in this 2-minute tip I'll show you how I do it and why. You can click the full screen button when playing the video if you've got the room.

At the end of the video I mention how Camtasia and Camtasia Studio can automatically create a table of contents by pulling the titles from PowerPoint. Here's where to learn more (Win) (Mac).

Clearly too, Jing has a 5-minute limit and most presentations are longer than that. (Check out Ignite-style presentations if you haven't heard of them.) One thing you can do is record two or three slides at a time, then build your own table of contents.

For example:

1. Intro and goals: http://screencast.com/t/somerandomURL
2. Current situation: http://screencast.com/t/somerandomURL
3. Next steps: http://screencast.com/t/somerandomURL
4. Conclusion: http://screencast.com/t/somerandomURL

It's about that time. People are scrambling to figure out what to be for Halloween. My main concern? I'll be in that semi-awkward situation where I go to a Halloween party and multiple people have the same costume as me. I'm talking about dressing up as the Jing software (not to be confused with Captain Jing) of course.

Here's a blast-from-the-past post from last year that will give you some tips if you want to go out as the Jing sun and impress your friends!

In this 27-second video, some of Captain Jing's colleagues give him some ideas for what he might be for Halloween.

Do you still need a last-minute Halloween costume? You can dress up as Jing!

Here's what you need to do:

1. Put on a yellow turtleneck.
2. Some yellow face paint doesn't hurt.
3. Blow up three yellow balloons--not too big.
4. Get a marker and as best you can, draw the three Jing icons...like this:

5. Affix the balloons to a headband.
6. Put on the headband!

We released some new software updates today. It's a free update for Camtasia Studio 7 users and Camtasia for Mac users. There's a number of new things, but the highlight is probably the captioning improvements. Camtasia Studio and Camtasia Relay (a server-based product) support speech to text. Camtasia for Mac didn't have caption support before today, and Camtasia Studio has really improved the ease and efficiency of adding captions.

And remember, on the PC side, Jing SWF or MP4 videos can go straight to Camtasia Studio. Another good way to use Jing and Camtasia Studio together is to have a bunch of people create Jing videos, then send them to a person using Camtasia Studio to edit and caption them. Jing-created MP4's can be opened in Camtasia for Mac too.

If you're interested in learning more about what's new in the Camtasia products today, I recommend you visit our Visual Lounge blog. Let us know what you think!

Oh, so this is my problem. I thought the Internet was the solution for everything! That instant search thing Google's got going on can lead to some great hits. Thanks @aurelian_s for my favorite tweet from Jing this week!

Here's how you can learn how to set up your Jing Twitter button. You can also follow the Jing team @jingtips.

(I made that graphic in the beta version of Snagit for Mac. You can get it here.)

Jing comes with three share output buttons: Screencast.com (where you get a handy link to paste into an email, IM, forum, etc.), Save, and Copy (for images only).

Did you know you can have up to 8 buttons? It just takes a little setup. In this Jing Tip we specifically show you how to make a Save button...with a twist. Instead of the button always prompting you where you want to save it, you can specify a destination. This was so handy for me when I was capturing dozens of user interface elements and storing them to a network drive.

Another area where this comes up is when people buy Jing Pro and wonder why the YouTube button isn't there. Some people have to work to learn they need to set it up themselves. That might not be the right implementation on our end, but we've had a very "don't-mess-with-people's-buttons" mantra around here.

Here's my button setup:

Are you enjoying the new fall TV line up? Are you among those like Ray wondering what happened to the Captain Jing series? Ray works on Camtasia Relay and is a HUGE fan. When he got to meet Captain Jing, it pretty much made his year.

Here was the original episode. If you visit the YouTube channel you can see how far our acting skills and production quality have come. (Maybe.)

Anyway, the good news is that none of these shenanigans harm the development of Jing. This is what happens when a bunch of 20 and 30-something tech nerds try to do something a little different.

We better get moving on season two. More action! Deeper plot lines! Less spandex! Tell us if you have any episode ideas, and select your favorite hero below!