Jing: A Perfect Storm is Brewing

Jing is absolutely my favorite piece of software made by TechSmith. It’s a quick and simple recipe for broadcasting images and video of your mac or pc that I believe has the potential to redefine how we think of screen capture / recording. It also has the opportunity to have a profound impact on how we communicate with and learn from each other whether its across the world or a few cubes down.

For the first time, rapid visual communication of our virtual desktops is possible. There’s no clunky workflow, no special knowledge of codecs and compression, no convoluted delivery choices — you don’t even need to have web space or know how to upload anything. Jing makes rich screen media creation and distribution accessible and even downright pleasurable.

There’s also some wicked cool science at play here. You see, Jing’s rich media delivery takes advantage of what’s called the picture superiority effect. Research indicates people learn better from images than they do from text. This effect is even more powerful, as Garr Reynold’s notes, when the consumer is casually exposed to the information.

Jing’s raison d’être is to quickly capture and share visual information with others via hyperlinks. You take a snapshot or record a short video, get the url back immediately in your clipboard and slam it in an IM chat window or email. The url is then shared casually with consumers (this isn’t rigid delivery like a classroom lecture). Hell, the lack of editing and spartan recording workflow within Jing means the decision to record is often impromptu — it’s quick, dirty and natural, just as our day to day visual experiences are in the real world.

Video. Let’s face it folks, we live in a world dominated by video. So much so that some interesting movements are afoot amongst progressive thinkers and educators. Michael Rosenblum argues we no longer “live in a print driven culture…we live in a video driven culture” as he makes his case for video literacy. He’s not alone in this sentiment. Apple recently profiled Maria Lovett’s “Writing with Video” class which riffs on the same idea and emphasizes the potential of video literacy for students who traditionally struggle with the written word.

Now I’m not trying to kill traditional literacy — I personally love words. I’m just looking for patterns and attempting to connect the dots. Prevalent broadband, web video momentum, easy screen recording and sharing, the picture superiority effect, video literacy, the ascendancy of the first web generation. When you add it all together its hard not to be excited by Jing.

So that’s my pitch on Jing. It’s free. Hosting is free (free basic screencast account) or you can put it on your own server if you’d like. There’s no excuse — check it out.

Making Jing SWF Videos Auto-Start

If you are embedding Jing video content on your website sometimes its preferable to have the video autostart instead of showing the reflecting click to play thumbnail. If that’s the case, you just need to pass in a parameter via flashvars or the url query string. Here’s a Jing video sans audio which shows you a couple of different ways to accomplish this.

If you prefer screenshots here’s a couple that convey the basic idea.

Embedding Screencast.com Jing Content

If you’re looking to embed Jing content hosted on Screencast.com on your own site here’s a snapshot of how you would do with SWFObject:

Right now there’s no “nice” way to grab a uri to the swf file you’d like to embed, so you will need to “View Source” in your browser, do a search for “swf” and copy the long nasty url you find (similar to the what the red arrow above is pointing at).

If you’re looking for “simple object / embed tags for Jing content on Screencast.com rather than the more sophisticated SWFObject content here’s a screenshot:

http://www.screencast.com/t/A1EpawUcmbr

If you just want to copy and paste embed tags–Screencast.com provides those, but you have to explicitly share the media. Watch the video below to see how:

Here’s what the WordPress Kimili Flash embed plugin code looks like (the embed code used for the embedded Jing swf directly above):

Jing Sans “Sun” GUI On OS X

If you’ve tried the Jing Rich Recording Client on OS X and the novelty of the Sun UI glob has worn thin it’s super simple to set up a shortcut key and turn the UI off entirely (a Jing menubar icon with three items will appear on the right hand side of the menu bar near the Spotlight icon). The keyboard shortcut launches the selection cross hairs for instantaneous recorder access, while the menu bar icon provides quick and easy access to the “History” manager and the “More” panel. I’ve made a simple Jing video sans audio that walks you through how to nix the gui.

The Jing Project – TechSmith’s Cross-platform Simple Screen Capture and Recording Now Available for Free Trial Period

Every once in a while you get to work on a project with the potential to be a game changer in the industry; something that can change people’s lives; a revolutionary technology that may fundamentally change the way we communicate with each other. I’m proud to announce that I was able to contribute in a small way to such a project. Today, Jing, TechSmith’s new simple sharing screen capture / recording tool and hosting service, is available to the general public as a trial “project”. Jing consists of two parts:

• A rich recording client for the Mac OS X or Windows Platforms
• A media hosting service

For the next little while TechSmith is providing the recording client and a media hosting account for free. So get out there and download the client and let me know how far off my hype was from your actual user experience.

Check out this video made by TechSmith’s Chris McQueen if you would like just a little bit more information before you download.