I know many developers use SnagIt for capturing images or even video for their applications. SnagIt is from TechSmith so I was surprised to hear about their new project, the free tool named Jing.
Jing appears as a glowing ball atop your screen as shown here:
Select the cross-hairs and then choose if you want to just capture an image or a video (with sound).
It then creates the file and you can instantly upload it to TechSmith’s ScreenCast.com or FTP it over to your site as needed. Fast and easy screen capture and looks great to boot!
When you do a screen capture, what’s really cool about it is that it stores the screen video as SWF (or Flash) , making it easy to embed directly into web pages or other locations (cross-platform).
The tag line as shown below is “Visual Conversation starts here” – and they’re right. I was really surprised at how easy this was to use. But it competes with their own commercial Camtasia and SnagIt -(it does promote their Screencast.com) so I’m not sure why they did it – but I’m definitely glad!
Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.
Maybe they got sick of people pirating SnagIt and decided to give them an option to be honest?