Jing 2.3

Jing is a screen capture and screencasting tool for Windows and Mac. It is a very basic and simple tool that allows you to capture pretty much anything that you can see on your screen.

For screenshot taking, I usually use the system that is built-in in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. It allows me to take screenshots of the whole screen or to select a region by dragging and dropping. But I reckon it has some limitations. Jing is a step forward from that system.

Basically, when you install Jing, you will see an image of a sun on the top-right corner of your screen, just below the Finder quick search. If you click on it, three options will appear: capture, history, and preferences. You can capture both images and videos, which include sound. But first, you need to tell Jing what to capture exactly . There are two ways of doing this. First, you can simply select an area of the screen by clicking and then dragging and dropping a square selection tool. Jing will show the size of the square in pixels in real time. The other way is the one that caught my eye. By clicking anywhere, Jing will automatically detect what it is that you want to capture. So, if you click on a QuickTime window, Jing will automatically use that as a selection and tell you the size of the window. If you are recording a video, you will see recording controls at the bottom. After the recording is done, Jing will launch a preview of your recording and you can share your video right afterwards.

Capturing of images is really easy and there is a hotkey to call the "capture" function if you don't want to use your mouse. Screenshots are saved in PNG and I don't see the way to change the format, that would be great.

Jing is free, but if you purchase the "Pro" version, you get access to some new features, like YouTube uploading, MPEG-4 format for exporting your videos and more. It is only $15 a year, so if you are really into screencasting, I can recommend this tool. Very intuitive and beautifully crafted.