By artarmon42 | No Comments
Last updated: Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Nowadays, I communicate alot with people remotely (e.g. my family who lives overseas and people I outsource work to). Sometimes what I want to say cannot be communicated via email or even chat. That’s when screen captures and video captures really help.

I’ve been a huge fan of TechSmith’s Snag-It. The $49.95 cost is well worth its capabilities.

I’ve also tried TechSmith’s Camtasia video capture utility. And while I did find it useful, I just found the $299 cost to be just too high for the few times that I’d actually use it. Every so often, I’d smack my head and seriously consider buying it to solve a particular problem, baulk at the price, and then figure out a solution without needing Camtasia.

Earlier this week, a fellow geek pointed me to Jing. Jing, which interestingly enough is a product from TechSmith (makers of SnagIt and Camtasia), is totally free. It has screen capture and video capture capabilities. While the user interface is slightly different from SnagIt and Camtasia, the functionality is the same plus more! With Jing, you also get free access to Screencast (where you can host the videos you make). It’s not time limited, but it is bandwidth limited. So if you’re doing a serious amount of sharing, you will have to pay to upgrade your account.

But you don’t need to upload your captures to Screencast. You can easily save them as local files or you can move it into the clipboard (so that you can paste it on-the-fly to programs such as Photoshop).

I’m just totally amazed that such an awesome program is free. Check it out now!

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