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!
I’m not sure what happened, but Derek has abruptly stopped making the tool available and has asked everyone to stop using it…
When I first heard about SpeedPPC, I rushed out and bought it for $497. I’ve been very happy with it, and in the grand scheme of things, an awesome tool. Depending on how much Pay-Per-Click Internet advertising you do, the $499 isn’t a significant deterrent. I think I recouped the cost easily with the first Adwords campaign I build with SpeedPPC.
Recently, Derek Beau released PPC Campaign Builder a PHP-based alternative that provides very similar functionality to SpeedPPC. Released unto the GNU Open Source license, it is effectively a free alternative.
Having used both, I’d say that it all boils down to this:
Given the Open Source nature of PPC Campaign Builder, there’s a good chance of significant future improvements. However, given the secrecy of affiliate marketers, a lot of the burden of work may remain with Derek.
SpeedPPC, as a commercial enterprise, is likely to keep building features. From what I read on the SpeedPPC Members Forum, support for Yahoo Search Marketing is just around the corner!
If you’re dabbling with Internet marketing, then free never hurts. If you’re not a coder, want business-level support & upgrades, then you might want to stick with SpeedPPC. Get more information about PPC Campaign Builder or SpeedPPC, and decide for yourself.
I was wondering how I could go about capitalizing every word in a block of text. So convert “this is the sample. texts example” to “This Is The Sample. Texts Sample”.
It took abit of Googling to find a way to do it, but it turns out to be relatively easy. In Word (2007):
In prior versions, the same function can be found in Format -> Change Case.
Smith