Jing Spruces Up Your Content
Writing content for your Web site or blog is an easy task. This is evidenced by the abundance of articles available online for us to subsist on, ranging from general topics to niche fields of interests. And to liven up a written piece, it’s been a common practice to pair them with relevant images. This way, both elements of the content can work together to simply balance a page’s layout, deliver an idea or stress a point.
However, sometimes there are specific posts that require more than just images to illustrate an action or activity. Instructional posts like how tos and product guides sometimes require more than text to show the reader the step-by-step directions to make sure they get it right. For these purposes, we have screen capture tools like Jing for creating still screenshots and for recording on-screen activities as videos for easy sharing online.
Developed by TechSmith, Jing is an ingenious screen capture software and paired with a pretty straightforward interface. Usage is plainly simple as you may have expected, letting you first select an area of your screen you would like to capture and make the necessary visual add-ons to the resulting image.
After a quick download and installation, Jing presents itself as an unobtrusive translucent yellow widget at the top of your desktop. Mouse on over and it’ll yield three spires “tentacles” for enabling the capture function, launching a window of your captured items and for accessing Jing’s settings.
Clicking on Capture will produce crosshairs onscreen for you to define the areas for capturing. You can choose to capture the entire desktop real estate, a section of it or an entire window. If you drag the crosshairs while pressing CTRL and it’ll maintain a 4:3 aspect ratio while Shift does it for 16:9. After capturing images, you can also add several visual elements like arrows, labels or captions and frames or you can choose to edit it using Snagit.
Meanwhile, recording videos will allow you to overlay narration by speaking onto your mic as you conduct your onscreen activities or instruction. After finishing, you have the option to port the output over to Camtasia Studio for editing.
Images are churned in .PNG while videos are in .SWF, two lossless formats that retains and even optimizes the resolution. These you can save to your computer, an FTP site or on the cloud through TechSmith’s supporting Screencast.com which gives you 2GB of storage and 2GB monthly bandwidth. Purchasing the $14.95/year Jing Pro will let you save your videos in MP4 and offers uploading to third-party video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. The paid service also allows you to record directly from your Web cam to perhaps add an introduction to your video.
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RSpears @ April 28, 2010
