Jing, Screencap for the Masses

If you work in tech at all, chances are you've been confronted countless times with trying to explain a strange behavior to a tech support person.  Instead of trying to explain your way through it, send them a video.  So much easier!  The problem is, most solutions are either clunky or you have to buy the software, and more often than not, both.

Today I had just such an experience with my web host.  As part of the troubleshooting process, they sent me a screencap video of the testing they did on their end.  The service they used was a combination of Jing and screencast.com.  Jing is the software on your local machine, and screencast.com is the free hosting service.  Both are so tightly integrated, it's a no-brainer to share what you've captured.

Jing let's you capture the whole screen, define a portion of the screen, or just select a specific application to capture.  You then have a 3 second countdown, and it starts capturing.  Do whatever actions you need, click stop, and you have a chance to review what you captured.  If you don't like it choose discard and start over.  If you want to keep it, click save, and you have the option of writing the file to your local machine, or uploading it directly to your screencast.com account.  I chose to put it online so my tech people could see exactly what was going on.  The (remarkably small) file uploads, and there's a few moments of waiting, presumably while the website processes it into a web-ready presentation, and when it completes the URL to the movie is automatically put directly on your clipboard ready to paste into any program you want be it email, chat, whatever.

Simple, sexy, slick.  No more trying to convince tech support you're really not crazy!!