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All of us, at one time or another, find a need for a good and simple screen capture tool. There are some decent ones out there, but I think most people who need serious screen capture abilities use SnagIT from TechSmith, which is an amazing bit of kit. But, like most tools, often it has features you rarely use or just don't need. Sometimes you need a tool that does "just enough".

And the folks at TechSmith have an answer for that too.

It is called Jing, and it too is a nice bit of code. Jing is a freeware project supported by TechSmith at the Jing Project site, which is where you can go to find everything about the product - but let me give you a taste of what it is and what it does.

After you install Jing you'll notice that you have a small "sun" on your desktop, usually stuck to the top of the screen (you can move it anywhere you like by simply dragging it - and it looks like a full sun while dragging it - clever). I have, in fact, placed my "Jing sun" on the right side of my widescreen notebook screen. This sun emits three "rays" while you hover over it, as shown below.



The first "ray" is what you click to perform a screen capture. After clicking it you get what can only be described as giant crosshairs on your screen, where you can select various squares or regions on the sreen; as you select them it gives you the size of that square, as shown below.



I know what you're thinking. "That's great Rock, but what if I want to capture only a part of a square?" Well don't fret, silly reader! Once you select a region Jing gives you the opportunity to select a smaller part - you simply drag the borders of the selected square until it contains just what you wanted to capture, as shown below.



After you have your desire selection bordered you choose what you want to capture - image or video. Yes, Jing has the ability to capture video (with sound!), screencam-style; however I'm not going to demonstrate that feature today, maybe I'll save that for another day (or hopefully someone else will review that feature before I get around to it ). After selecting image, you have the ability to add various enhancements to your screen capture, as demonstrated below.



Notice the icons in the upper left of the frame. These icons allow you to add arrows, text boxes, borders, or highlight a selection in your screen capture. You can also change the colors of these various features using the color selector. My quickly-enhanced image is below.



If you don't like what you've done, Undo and Redo buttons are provided as well. Based on the ugly colors I've chosen (it also includes a custom color selector), maybe I should use this feature.

Once you've finished enhancing your screen capture you have a variety of places you can store it. These include Flickr, FTP site, a file directory, or a new place called Screencast.com. Screencast.com is a new image/video storage site much like Flickr, and it is currently free. It is tightly integrated into Jing - you're even prompted to create a Screencast.com account during Jing installation. Screencast.com is still relatively new, so the jury is still out on it; however in my tests it works fine.

After you select where you're going to store your screen capture, you have to decide how you want to access it. Your screen capture will be stored in the location you specify, and then you have various ways to instantly use it including receiving a URL to it, an embed tag for it, saving the file, or copying it to the clipboard. You can also cancel the whole operation.

There's one more feature that is nice - the History window. If you click the middle "ray" of the Jing sun you are presented with a clipboard of all store Jing images. This clipboard provides you instant access to these images for reuse.



While Jing is pretty useful, there are some limitations. First, the images are only stored in PNG format. Second, the screencams are only stored in Flash format. Also, if you're used to the rich functionality (and you take advantage of it) in SnagIT, you will be disappointed.

But if you need a simple, lightweight, and useful screen capture program, you could do a lot worse than Jing - and I'm not sure if you'll do much better for free.

Rock