Jing is a pretty neat tool. I use it quite a bit. It’s a free program for Mac or PC that takes still image screenshots or movies of your screen and uploads them to various sites for sharing with others. I signed up for a Pro account a while ago, and it’s been useful all along. There are, however, a few things that Jing should do that it does not.
First, the graying out of uncaptured areas needs to go. I’m not sure what Jing is doing during that time, but I have 5 monitors, and it takes forever for it to start up a new capture. The only time I use Jing instead of SnagIt these days is when I need video or am willing to wait for the delay, which isn’t often.
Jing needs to capture to SnagIt’s Editor. The ability to catalog screenshots is pretty valuable to me. If you didn’t know this about TechSmith’s other product, SnagIt, it will not only do screen captures, but also capture metadata about the thing it captures, like the window title, the program captured, or the URL of the site browsed.
Jing needs to let me manipulate the windows behind its interface while it’s counting down to record. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to restart the capture (and the wait period) because I noticed that something I didn’t want captured was on the screen while the countdown was running. Camtasia allows this. It’s strange that TechSmith’s three different products use completely different capture engines.
Five minutes of video is occasionally not long enough. Six would be better. Unlimited would be the best.
Uploads to S3 and SFTP would be a very welcome addition to the upload options that Jing already provides. I don’t have any access to FTP servers anymore - they’re all more secure SFTP servers. And S3 support would allow me to upload to my own domain, which would be ideal. (And no, I don’t want the ability to pay extra to associate a domain with my screencast.com account, thanks.)
What would be ideal is if SnagIt did all the stuff that Jing does. I like how Jing selects windows and regions without having to specify in advance which you want to do. I also like the formats that Jing captures video in, and that it includes audio, which SnagIt doesn’t do. If SnagIt 10 does these things, I’ll buy an upgrade and ditch Jing altogether.
Finally, the folks at TechSmith need a better issue queue for Jing. I’ve sent these issues to them via their support form, but there’s no response and no recording of the reporting. It seems like it would be a helpful thing for TechSmith to record how many people might like a particular feature (or fixing a particularly nagging bug) so that they can know what to focus on next, and so that I can stop complaining about them on my blog.
