Coolest New Tool I've Seen This Year

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Jul 17, 2007

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Holy cow, I just found the coolest software application that is going to save me at least 8 hours each month and immeasurable amounts of aggravation...and it's fun to use, too!

I spend hours on the telephone each week walking people through tasks like setting up product discounts on e-commerce websites, configuring full-text indexing on SQL server or changing IIS configuration settings on their web servers. Sometimes I'm lucky enough to be able to remotely control the other computer, but not usually. Most of the time I'm saying, "Check the box that says yada yada" or "click the exclamation point in the toolbar." At least once during each phone call, I think to myself, "I could save us both a lot of aggravation if I could just show him my screen." When I do send screenshots, I usually have to open SnagIt, snap the shot, email it, wait for the email to arrive and hope that he can check his email from the computer he is working on. Sometimes that method works, but not always. Now there's a better way!

Enter Jing!

Created by the folks that developed SnagIt, Jing is a screen capture tool for Mac OS and Windows that makes sharing anything on your screen incredibly easy. When you install Jing, it creates a tray icon and a small half-circle tab at the top of your screen (see screenshot below) that you can use to activate Jing.

To snap a screenshot, you simply hover your mouse over the half-circle, click the cross hairs and then click & drag to highlight the area you want to capture. You can then annotate it withi arrows, text, shapes or highlights, and when you're done, click the Share button. Jing instantly uploads your screenshot to your free screencast.com account and copies a short URL to your clipboard. You can paste the URL into your IM client, email or just tell the person on the other end of the phone the URL.

An example URL looks like this: http://www.screencast.com/t/35mCoZau

This is just a darned cool tool that will save anyone involved in I.T. support hours. It's also an easy way to quickly share a photo on your computer with someone else.

But wait, there's more! You can even share a video of your desktop with other people if you want to teach them step-by-step how to do something, like typing a blog post. Here's the video, http://www.screencast.com/t/3BzxNuh6.

You can read more about it here.