Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

Everyone loves a good screencast, right? You want to highlight your product or showcase a feature, so you start up your favorite screen recorder and record away. Then comes the fun part...the editing. Before you know it, a 15 minute screencast has turned into 2 hours of editing hell. My personal torture tool of choice is Camtasia - which does a lot of cool features such as automatic zooming and panning and noise removal. But recently , I've talked about Jing - yes, it's by the same company (Techsmith) - but primarily as a screen image capture utility. But this post isn't so much about talking about a product as it is about how to make these things easier. Whenever a great session is given at a conference, it's often because the presenter has done one of three things: a) practiced b) practising regularly  (if they were English) c) rubbed their lucky rabbit's foot on a horseshoe after seeing a rainbow In Screencasting, the same is true (well, except the part about t...

I know many developers use SnagIt for capturing images or even video for their applications. SnagIt is from TechSmith so I was surprised to hear about their new project, the free tool named Jing. Jing appears as a glowing ball atop your screen as shown here: Select the cross-hairs and then choose if you want to just capture an image or a video (with sound). It then creates the file and you can instantly upload it to TechSmith's ScreenCast.com or FTP it over to your site as needed. Fast and easy screen capture and looks great to boot! When you do a screen capture, what's really cool about it is that it stores the screen video as SWF (or Flash) , making it easy to embed directly into web pages or other locations (cross-platform). The tag line as shown below is "Visual Conversation starts here" - and they're right. I was really surprised at how easy this was to use. But it competes with their own commercial Camtasia and SnagIt -(it does promote their Screencast.com)...