Posts Tagged ‘tools’
Jing it!
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010Ever needed to quickly capture a specific section of your computer screen, maybe annotate it and paste it into an email for someone to clearly understand a point you’re trying to make? In less than 30 seconds? Jing it.
Before Jing – a nifty product from a Michigan company called TechSmith - I was using the “Prnt Scrn” button to capture the entire screen and customizing the view with annotations and cropping in PowerPoint or Adobe Photoshop Elements (the limit of my graphics capabilities) before pasting into the email. Time required: LOTS more than 30 seconds.
Now, I have a small sun at the top of my screen that I can click, which enables me to “draw” a rectangle on my screen. In this screen, I can either capture a still image or even start a video capture that pulls whatever occurs within that drawn screen area. Using my microphone, I can also comment on what is occurring on the screen, and I can even send the captured video segment directly to my YouTube channel or save it as an mp4.
When developing and debugging ActSeed’s community platform with a development team located in the US, Spain and India, we used Jing extensively to rapidly and clearly capture issues that needed modifying. We’re going to use Jing with one of its sister products (Camtasia) to create ActSeed video tutorials.
In summary, it’s worth your time to check out this clever tool. They offer an image capture version for free and the version that captures video (“Pro”) is only $15. If you don’t know me yet, I’m a big fan of paying for value, so I purchased the $15 version and think the price might even be a tad low for the value received. If you’re using a similar tool called Snagit, then you’re already familiar with this type of tool and guess what? Jing and Snagit are both siblings of the same parent company (TechSmith)!
You can download the free or Pro version of Jing here.
Disclaimer: Jing didn’t give me a free download. They didn’t pay me to say nice things. I pay my own way, but want to share this cool tool with other entrepreneurs and business people. We’re generally all the same – lots of needs, short on time and limited resources, so it’s nice to share a way to leverage our common reality with a tool like Jing!
Do you have a story to share about how you use Jing? I’d like to hear it, so please leave a comment if you can.
Do you have another cool tool or service that you think we should highlight? Please tell me!
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Leveraging Our Realities to Make Yours Better
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009…and hoping you’ll be doing the same for us!
I’ve benefited from many random but excellent recommendations and suggestions over the years. Have you ever overheard someone talking about a productivity-enhancing tool or widget, tried it and found it to be irreplaceable? Have you ever had a colleague recommend a service in casual conversation that becomes indispensable to your business?
Well, I have for sure. Many of them, and I’m looking forward to sharing them with you.
When we can, we’ll do our best to not only suggest processes, technologies, services, etc. that can increase your productivity, boost your efficiency or generally protect your sanity, but we’ll also try to give you the “entrepreneur’s perspective” and possibly even share a word or two from the entrepreneurs who are responsible for the innovative solutions we’re championing.
We want this to be a two way street as well. Please share tips, tools and services that you discover. Inspire us! We hope to return the favor here…
