Jing Project ~ A Great Free Alternative to Camtasia

Are you still looking for the free Camtasia deal? It’s no longer available, but there is the Jing Project.  A while back I there was the opportunity to get Camtasia for free. Many people missed it and I still get traffic to a post I wrote about how you could do it. The offer is no longer valid but there is a great alternative called Jing.

I had downloaded Jing a while back and never installed it on my computer. I didn’t really find it necessary since I have Camtasia. However, I have recently been adding screenshots to blog posts, and found my method of donig it was bassackwards, and time consuming. I remembered Jing was supposed to be great for screen shots so I installed it today and started using it.

First things first. Jing was very easy to install, just click the download button and hit go. It produces this little yellow sun that hangs out at the top of your screen.  When you want to grab something you just hover on the sun and it will give you three options, capture, history and preferences.

If you choose to grab a screen shot ~ and it does video too ~ you just drag a square where you want it anywhere on your screen and then click save. Jing automatically saves it to a place called Screencast.com. It also saves the url to what you saved on your clipboard, so you can quickly come to your blog, click to html and paste your image right in.  It seriously takes 5 seconds.

Once you have your image chosen you can quickly and easily draw an arrow on it pointing to exactly what you need people to see, you can add text boxes to make a point. All by clicking one little button.  It has a lot of options and possibilities for a free program, and I’ve had a great time using it today.

In the history button you can find all the screenshots you’ve taken so far. You can grab them and paste them in blog posts, or you can send them in email, or IM. When you save them you also have the option of saving the embed code which will also copy to your clipboard. When you paste the code into your blog it will show the actual image instead of a link to go see it.

A bit about screencast.com. This is basically a free hosting area for your images and video. Your library has different privacy settings depending on what you want to do with your images. You can make it so everyone can view, or you can set it so no one can see them without an email invitation and everywhere in between.

I will be opening a new Membership site in the next week or so, and have been putting together content for it.  A lot of the content is simple tutorials for beginners. Jing has been perfect for showing the steps visually as I go.  But what’s also very cool is screencast.com provides me a way to very easily host all the videos and know they are secure so I don’t lose my membership site content.

I’ve had a blast with it today, and find myself using it just to get a point across or show someone what I’m talking about in an IM, which is exactly what Jing was created to do.

Did I mention the whole shebang is FREE?? Check it out and let me know what you think. I find it quite fun and very easy to use, which opens up a whole new world of helping others.