Jing's a tricky little application in that it's part desktop software--part Internet utility.

The better we understand how people perceive Jing and how they use it as part of their daily work, the better we can decide what to do next in Jing's development.

I have a super short, 4-question survey for you. (Don't worry, no essays!) I hope you'll spare a moment and take us up on it. This puppy really wants you to!

Survey: What do you do with your Jing captures?

We've been working on a collection of presenter materials to help educators tell and teach others about Jing. We're almost done, but one area we could use more help is collecting diverse examples showing the wide range of how Jing is being used by teachers, students, IT, administrators, etc.

If you've got a story and are willing to share, email Dave McCollom our Educational Evangelist, at d.mccollom@techsmith.com, and me at m.curtis@techsmith.com

Here's what we've got so far. You'll be able to pick and choose the things you'd like, and use them however you want. What's missing from this list? Post a comment or send us feedback!

• PowerPoint presentation: Non-salesy, basic overview of Jing. It emphasizes the "how and why."
• Handouts:
  • Get Started "how-to" guide
  • Examples of how Jing is used in the real world
  • Screencast.com frequently asked questions
  • Using embed code
  • Using Jing with YouTube
• Resources:
  • Sample agenda, list of additional resources, FAQs
  • Various images and screenshots of Jing you can add to your own instructions or presentation
  • Special version of the Jing Interactive Tutorial (so you don't have to rely on Internet)
  • Download-able copies of our most popular Jing videos

We're planning to have the materials ready in early June.

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.

Betsy, from TechSmith's Visual Lounge sat down with Dirk (Product manager of Jing and Screencast.com) and asked him some questions about his background, various TechSmith roles and ... she brought up Jing's five minute video limit.

I thought you'd like to hear about this interview, and you can post comments to this post or send it to us directly.

If you're reading this, you probably have a really good handle on how to use Jing.

But can you think back to when you first installed it? Did you even see the Sun launcher? What in the world is that yellow orb thing? Did you capture an image or video and wonder what's next?

We created an interactive, Flash-based tutorial. We'll get this into Jing for the next release, but we wanted people to try it right away. Do you think this would be helpful to new users? We're hoping to get some feedback and we encourage you to send it to others.

Why did we make this tutorial?

We know a few things. We know a lot of people can be confused by the non-traditional UI, and don't "get" the idea of sharing content via a Screencast.com link.

We also know that once people have that first successful share, they tend to get Jing and from then on, it's pretty easy.

This tutorial then, is just one more way to try and help people get off to a good start with a successful capture! We hope it works!

For this next release, we will be addressing some of our top feature requests from you. Among the improvements on tap is Facebook integration.

We've asked for feedback before, but this time, let's do something different.

We want to invite you to be a part of the Jing team. Well, as much as possible.

Most of you reading this are regular Jing users. Our guess is a lot of you also use Facebook.

Seems almost too logical then... If Jing is going to work with Facebook, and we have people who use Jing and Facebook, it seems we should work together to learn what people really want and nail this feature.

We revamped Jing's Facebook page, started a discussion and we hope people will talk with each other, and not just at us. To facilitate, we're going to be posting a lot of behind-the-scenes videos, demos of our progress and post specific questions which we hope will spawn some good discussion and debate. We hope some of you will take us up on it.

Hello world! My name is Alan and I'm the user experience\user interface designer on the Jing team (with a smattering of programming on the side). This is my first post on the blog!! Weee!

As you probably already know, we recently added Twitter to the list of places Jing can share captures to. I hope you all have been enjoying this new functionality, I know I certainly had a lot of fun working on it!

But now that it's been out in the wild a little bit, we'd really love if you could give us some feedback on this new feature. If you could spare a moment, completing this teeny-tiny survey that Anton put together would really help us gauge how well a certain aspect of the design is working. Also, if you have any other feedback or requests, please feel free to post a comment, or send it in through our feedback form!

Thanks, and happy Jinging!

Didn't get the Twitter button working? Check out the Twitter help topic for info on how to get it going.

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.