Here's an obscure tip that you can use to blow the minds of all your Jing friends.

When you make a text box on the Mac version of Jing, you can press a key combination to align the text:

• Align left is Command-{
• Align right is Command-}
• Align center is Command-|

At the risk of gratuitous visual communication, I fired up Jing and my webcam to make the keys double clear.

I doubt this will change your life, but I promised obscure...not earth-shattering. Enjoy!

As someone who writes error messages as part of their job, I tend to notice the non-traditional ones. Firefox has some good ones--and who could leave out the Twitter Fail Whale?

Anyway, a Snagit user tweeted the one below and it made me smile. Calling out developers in error messages? Hmmm, doesn't help the user, but I could see having some fun with this...

@gdnovey Received funny error message when signing in to Digg.com using Facebook Connect. http://bit.ly/daVDEw

Do you use Dropbox? It's like a shared folder you can use to easily share files between your computers--or people you've authorized. The Dropbox website can explain it better!

It's easy to create a button in Jing that will send your image or video to a Dropbox folder in one click. I made a video (1:26) using Camtasia for Mac to show you how this is done.

We've put together a comprehensive PDF with all sorts of tips for making more engaging screencasts. We never did, however, think of the one offered by this Twitterer:

Well there you have it. Do you have other tips we missed?

One of my favorites when it comes to Jing is to hold down Shift or Control as you select your recording region. This will give you a standard and consistent video size. Don't record the full screen unless you absolutely have to. Recording full screen creates a larger file for the viewer and sometimes they can't see the whole video without scrolling.

You may have heard about the Snagit release for Mac yesterday, but you may not have heard of this:

TechSmith is running a promo giveaway for the release. Prizes include a MacBook Pro, iPad, and titanium sporks. Check here for more details, but basically you tweet or otherwise spread the word about Snagit, then capture it as evidence and send it in to [maybe] win. You can capture the evidence with Snagit or Jing to submit your entry!

Author's note: I'm reposting this news from the Visual Lounge.

Guess what the biggest feature request is for Snagit? For years, the number one feature request has been to bring Snagit to the Mac platform.

Today I'm happy to announce that this feature request has been fulfilled! Please help us celebrate the release of Snagit on Mac today!

Snagit was built from the ground up just for Mac users. We had input from over 100,000 beta testers that helped us build it.

Snagit on Mac has lots of great features and functionality, including:

• Capture: Snagit allows users to capture any image from their screen at the click of a button or hotkey, including scrolling web pages, windows, images and regions or areas of the screen.
• Snagit Editor: Edit captures with callouts, arrows, lines and numerous other finishing touches. Users can manage recent captures in an image tray and drag multiple images from the tray to the canvas to combine them. All screen captures are automatically saved, allowing users to grab multiple images, and work on them later.
• Share: Easily share captures by saving in a range of popular image formats or exporting with a single click to emails, FTP sites or to Screencast.com, TechSmith's own hosting site.
• Auto-scrolling capture: Capture images below what is visible on the screen, for example when capturing a lengthy web page.
• Drag-and-Drop: Snagit on Mac supports the Mac standard drag-and-drop function to popular applications like iWorks, Microsoft Office and more.

You can learn more about the new release of Snagit on Mac here.

Already own a license of Snagit on the PC? If you own Snagit v10, you're also entitled to a free copy of Snagit on Mac. If you're a new user, you pay just one price for a license of Snagit on Windows and Mac ($49.95). If you have an older version of Snagit on the PC, you can upgrade a single user license to Snagit v10 and get Snagit on Mac for only $24.95. More users or questions? Contact sales.

Ready to try out Snagit for Mac? Download the 30 day, fully functional eval here.

And, TechSmith extends a huge thank you to our 100,000 beta testers! Our products are better because of you! Please continue to send us feedback for future releases.

What do you think of the new release of Snagit on the Mac?