Jing Screen Capture and Auto Upload Software

Techsmith, the creators of Jing, are making the news every day with an exciting announcement. They are giving away old versions of Camtasia and SnagIt for free and now announced a new screen capturing utility with two interesting features. The Jing project is currently in beta and it could happen that it becomes a commercial product afterwards, as for now it is completely free to use.

Jing lets the user capture part of the screen by dragging a rectangle around the part of the screen that he wants to capture. This rectangle can be moved around and some parts of the screen are recognized as units which can be captured without drawing the rectangle around them. The rest of the screen is shown in black and white which makes it easier to hit the mark. Once the image has been captured it can be spiced up by adding arrows, a highlighted area, text, and a frame to it to annotate or catch the attention of the viewer.

The so created image or video can be easily uploaded to Screencast, ftp, Flickr or saved as a file locally. This is a great feature for webmasters who create a lot of screenshots that they embed in their website to spice up articles there.

Users have to signup to Screencast during setup of Jing which is an uncomplicated process. They receive 200 Megabytes of free space and 1 Gigabyte transfer limit per month. Don’t worry, you do not have to use this service to use Jing.

What I like about Jing is that it is relatively uncomplicated to use and has some great features like the upload ability that saves me some steps when creating screenshots. The user interface however is experimental and users surely will need some time before they get used to it.

My projection is that Jing will become commercial sooner or later so grab it while it is hot and free. Runs on Windows and Mac computers.