Screen Captures Are a Snap With Jing

There are various pieces of software (and screen and browser widgets) that allow users easy ways to take screenshots and even video captures of anything that can be displayed on a computer screen. But a new free service called Jing - www.jingproject.com - stands a cut above the rest in some important respects and seems worth trying out.

Jing starts with a small piece of software that you download and install to  any recent PC or Mac with a fast internet connection. Once it starts to install it asks the user to create an account on a web storage service called Screencast.com - which we'll come back to in a moment. The program will log into Screencast.com everytime it starts up.

Once launched, Jing will (optionally) nestle near the upper right corner of your screen in the form of an unobtrusive semi-transparent yellow quadrant. Waving your mouse over the quadrant will reveal three options - Capture, History (where you can see your recent captures), and More (where you can change Jing's settings).

Clicking Capture will allow you to use your mouse to position a pointer, and hold down your left mouse button to select the rectangular area of your choice anywhere on the screen (which can be further adjusted if necessary). Users can then either take a screenshot (still picture) of that area of their screen, or capture a video that is playing there.

That's all fairly standard to these types of programs. What's neat about Jing is that gives you the option to upload anything you capture to Screencast.com, save it there (you are given a free Screencast.com account with 2 GB of storage plus 2 GB of throughput - for playing your videos - each month), and best of all returns users either a link to their image or video file or an embed tag. Both of which are very useful. You can take links and send them to friends and coworkers via email or instant messaging. You can use links or embed tags to allow people to access your screenshot or video from any website you add it to.

In addition, Jing let's you put screen captures or video directly into a user's Flickr photo/video storage account, send it to any web server via FTP, or simply save it as a file on your computer. It also give you some simple tools to draw on the captures or add text on top of them - great for use in presentations.

Although the whole connection between Screenshot.com and Jing is rather awkward, the technology behind the project is solid, and overall Jing seems to be a winner. Simple, useful and powerful, consider giving it a try next time you're checking out new tech. The only complaint we had is that video captures only capture sound via the user's computer's on-board microphone. Hopefully, a fix similar to various Skype capture services is in the production pipeline.