This New Year 2014 I’m thinking of doing something different on top of what I am already sharing and posting on this blog. I’ve been publishing posts about my travels, itineraries, food trips, personal experiences and others but I have not shared yet cool tools I am using to aid my blogging adventure.
So I am creating this new category on Penfires: Blogging – Tools – Freelancing, who knows down the road I’ll get to convince you to try your hand at blogging too. =)
That being said let me introduce you to one of my pinaka-favorite na online tool / product. It’s Jing by TechSmith. =)
and the awesome thing about this product is that you can download and use this for FREE!!! 😀
So here is a tutorial for Jing by Techsmith, hope you’ll find it a useful guide!
I am a big fan of Jing ever since nakadaupang palad ko sya when I started my online freelancing career. As expected whenever I bumped into a real cool tool or program I can’t help myself but share the info with friends. 
Errr ‘share’ is a gentle word, ‘forced’ might be more appropriate lol 🙄 but heyyy, it worked! I’ve got a few converts already! 😆
And right now I am trying to recruit you too to try out Jing for your laptops and desktop hehehe. Heads-up! You won’t regret it. Really you won’t, maniwala ka.
=)
Kachiiiing!
Nahhh, nope, I don’t earn from promoting Jing, there is no affiliate link, no commission etc. I really just love Jing!
BENEFITS and USES of JING
Naksss parang ang seryoso hehehhe.
Jing is best use when you are collaborating on a project with friends or teammates or for sharing what exactly you are seeing on your screen. It makes life easier especially if you are teaching someone step by step procedure since you can annotate the capture and then share it.
It’s also like having your friend beside you and watching the same screen you are looking at. Great too for chitchat and gossips as in subok ko na sa tsismisan hehehe. Puede din pala to pag you are doing online research for assignments and projects.
What Jing Does and How it works
You can take a capture of your screen – you can choose video or image capture. You can also control what part of the screen you want to capture unlike the ‘prntscr’ key which automatically capture your whole screen and you have to go to Paint if you want to crop the captured image.
You can also edit your snapshot – add arrows or text box with special notes or highlight a section you want highlighted.
Once capture is ready, you just click the “upload” icon on the Jing tray and Jing will automatically upload it to your screencast account connected to your Jing account if you are connected to the internet.
Note: You can also access all your captured images and videos when you login to your screencast.com account.
If you are offline you can still capture an image or video, save it locally and upload it when you have net connection. You can also choose to not upload it at all and just keep a local copy.
Jing “upload” icon and “save to hard-drive” icon
Uploading speed depends on your ISP capability as well as on the type of file you are uploading – image or video. Generally, you’ll just wait for a few second for an image to be uploaded and be ready for sharing. The wait is a little bit more if you will take a video screencast.
Jing video capture is limited to 5 minutes only 🙁
Techsmith has another product ‘Snagit’ that can take longer video but you have to pay to use it. Camtasia, another Techsmith product is way better than Jing and Snagit as a video capturing and editing software but it’s expensive, can’t afford. 🙁
Anyhow, back to Jing…. 🙂
Once the image/video is uploaded to your screencast.com account, you can then grab its “link” and give this link to whoever you want to, your friend, your colleague, even your boss! They will “see” your screen and you can resume your discussion.
DEMO: This is how Jing works – capturing an image, adding notes and then sharing it. Click on the video “play” button to start the Jing demo.
GET A SCREENCAST.COM ACCOUNT
1. Sign up to screencast.com, it’s free! – http://screencast.com/
2. Once you are registered, you can create a folder if you want or just use the default folder.
Note: The default folder is set ‘public’. If you are like me who wants a more strict privacy setting, I suggest you add a new folder label this as ‘work’ or ‘whatever’ then set this folder to Private. Connect this new private folder in screencast.com to your Jing account. This way only those who has the link of the image/video you uploaded will be able to access and see it.
3. Once that is done, next step is to download Jing.
You can do the reverse – download and set-up Jing first and then sign-up to Screencast.com. The important thing is you connect these two products.
GET A FREE JING ACCOUNT for your desktop and laptops
- Download Jing from Techsmith – Go to http://techsmith.com/
Scroll to the bottom of the page to see a button for Jing, which if you click will lead you to the download page , see this for guide in locating – http://screencast.com/t/yIAYrHaj
2. Once downloaded, install Jing by following its user-friendly screen prompts.
Note: You will know if you have successfully installed Jing on your computer because you can see a sun peeking at the edges of your screen. Check this link to see what I mean: http://screencast.com/t/IlgOJuBXgi
3. Take a capture, start with image first.
4. Once you have your image, you can add text on it or arrows or box to highlight a part of your captured image.
5. Upload it, wait a few minutes, and then you will get your unique link to the captured image.
6. Share the link to friends in Facebook; post it in your blog or wherever.
See this Jing demo I made for you on how to capture the image on your screen and annotate it with instructions or notes: http://screencast.com/t/Id5tptQZWY5D
The actual captured image from the demo above: http://screencast.com/t/HYGRbtzC
You can also store a copy of your captured image or video in your computer’s hard-drive but note that if you delete the capture in Jing’s History, your local copy in your hard-drive will also be deleted based on my experienced.
What I usually do if I know I’ll be using a capture yet I want to delete it from Jing history is to save it on C:// or D:// local drive and then process the image via Photoscape and save the file under a new file name.
Photoscape is my favorite Photo Editing tool since I can’t make heads and tails of Photoshop. Actually, I don’t know much about editing photos period lol. I use Photoscape to put in my blog’s watermark and to make pic collage. Hope to post a tutorial on this FREE picture editing software in the future.
But for now head over to Jing creator’s website, that’s Techsmith, to know more about the features of this amazing free tool to make your online life easier and way cooler!
Salamat! Adios! =)
p.s. if you get Jing after reading about it on this blog post, please leave a message on the comment section, It’ll thrill me big haha.
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