Ed-a-Torials @ Honey Bear Playhomes's dashboard

Jing is a product that can capture either a still image of anything on your screen or a video/audio recording of up to 5 minutes of your screen. Wouldn’t it be handy to show the someone how to do something or what problem you have, rather than just trying to explain the steps. Once you start using Jings screen capture you wonder what you did without it. It is great for taking a picture of a website, your site building problems, or application instructions.

At the top center of my screen there is a small, semi-transparent sun - apparently this can be changed to a menu-bar icon on the Mac. When I roll over this minimized sun icon, it enlarges, presenting me with three icons - a cross-hair, photo-set and cog.

As you’d expect, the cross-hair is for capturing images or videos, the photo-set is for accessing your library of files, and the cog is to change your settings.

Clicking on the first automatically creates a full-screen cross-hair with which I can drag and drop the portion of the screen I would like to record or capture.

The second icon opens a new window with my previously recorded items in thumbnail format ready for me to scan through and preview if need be.

The third option opens up a larger sun in the center of my screen, from which I can access help files, quit the application, or send feedback to Techsmith.

I can also change my preferences in terms of whether or not I would like Jing to open on start up, and the hot key I would like to use to launch its capture capability.

What I like about the cross-hair is that it pops up straight away for my selection of a screen region whether I am going to record video or capture an image.

From there, once I have selected the region of the screen, I can decide what I would like to do with it. This is a nice approach, and will make sense to those not familiar with more complex screen capture and screencasting solutions.

Recording or Capturing

Once I have chosen the region of the screen I wish to work with, the remainder of the screen is switched to monochrome, firmly emphasizing my choice. Then I can choose to redo my selection, cancel, or create a screen grab or video from it.

If I chose an image, a new window opens with my freshly grabbed still, and from here I can apply basic annotation effects - an arrow, text, hollow rectangle or marquee-style highlighter are available.

This means that if I want to point to a particular image, or draw attention to a particular line or paragraph of text, it is easily done.



I can then share, save or cancel the work I’ve done.



For video, I have stop, pause and resume, mute audio and cancel buttons. There are no editing capabilities and you can’t rewind or trim the beginning off your clip, so you have to get things right first time and in one-take.



Nevertheless, for the kind of simple functions Jing Project is likely to be put to, this is good thing, and once again puts simplicity and ease-of-use center-stage.

Sharing



What sharing capabilities Jing Project has have been made very easy to use.

As soon as you have finished a capture or recording you are given the option of either sharing - which will upload the file to your Screencast.com account instantly and you can email YOLA customer support the URL or simply post it here in the forums with no need to save then upload the image - or saving, whereby you can choose the destination on your computer that you wish the file to be stored.

This at least this gives you the choice of either sharing your file over the web, or sending it in an email.

It’s really as simple as that. Furthermore, should you decide to delete a file at some later point, it will also be deleted on Screencast.com. All from clicking the delete button below your image or video.

As your videos and images are all stored locally and arranged in a library of thumbnails, you are not forced to share them immediately, and can easily do so at any point in time.

Images, which can be saved to your desktop or instantly shared from your Screencast.com account, are only produced in the .png format.

There is nothing wrong with that, per se, but if you want a .jpeg file, you are going to have to convert the file yourself with another application.

In terms of ease of use and two-for-one functionality, Jing Project is a knock-out success, providing one of the easiest ways to capture video or still images from your desktop that I have seen to date.

This will be priceless for those trying to let YOLA customer support or the programmers see your problems instead of simply trying to tell them what you see... Additionally it's great for educational/training roles, and will also come in very handy for others looking to help out a friend without having to explain an on-screen procedure blow-by-blow in text, or over the phone.

Select an Area to Capture

Jing can capture your entire screen, a window, or an area of the screen you specify.



Capture an Image

Jing can capture and share images from your computer screen. You can annotate the images with text, arrows and more to draw your viewer's attention and make your point clear.



Capture a Video

Jing can capture and share videos (up to five minutes long) from your computer screen.



As they say "A picture is worth a thousand words" Try out JING for yourself...

http://www.jingproject.com/

JING help center

http://help.jingproject.com/

I hope that those trying to explain their problems can instead simply show them and not have to search for proper terminology that can be at times difficult to get across. If you have a problem just click your Jing sun and take a snapshot or video and share it with us here to help you get back to site building sooner than later...

Happy site building
Ed

You can find me with my head in the honey pot here..

Honey Bear Playhomes Tips and Favs in one place... A Honey bear Playhomes Tip ;)

Thumbizy is an online website thumbnail creator that can almost instantly generate a thumbnail image of any website. All it asks for is the website URL (no registration or signup). You can also choose the size of the thumbnail image, to take a snapshot of a little or the whole page and so much more...

http://www.thumbizy.com/

The full page setting is truly quite nice but it does not handle flash too well ;)

A few more...

http://www.thumbalizr.com/index.php

http://snapcasa.com/default.aspx

Happy site building
Ed

You can find me with my head in the honey pot here..

Honey Bear Playhomes Tips and Favs in one place... A Honey bear Playhomes Tip ;)

Keep your copyright up to date.

Want a copyright in your footer (or anywhere else on your website) that will automatically change year to year without you having to edit a thing? Well this couldn't be easier. Use the copyright generator below to fill in your details and copy and paste the generated code into an HTML widget on your page where you'd like your copyright information to appear.

http://www.webweaver.nu/tools/copyrig...

Even if you forget it won't ;)

Happy site building
Ed

You can find me with my head in the honey pot here..

Honey Bear Playhomes Tips and Favs in one place... A Honey bear Playhomes Tip ;)

While the site builder does have a favicon (logo in the browser) generator built into the side bar it does not create a cross browser favicon.

To make one that is cross browser compatible simply;

1) Go to http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
2) Browse your computer for the image that you want as your favicon
3) Click the "Create Icon" button
4) Then after it generates your favicon click the "Download favicon" button
5) Save it to your computer
6) Upload it to your file manager
7) Take the following code and place it in an HTML widget

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="resources/favicon.ico">

8) Update your site to view

Happy site building
Ed

You can find me with my head in the honey pot here..

Honey Bear Playhomes Tips and Favs in one place... A Honey bear Playhomes Tip ;)

(Oh by the way don't forget to remove the favicon in your sidebar ;)