Jing is one of my favorite utility tools for PC, and one I recommend to clients all the time.
You may be familiar with the ‘print screen’ key on your keyboard. Jing is the best ‘print screen’ or screen capture tool I’ve come across.
It’s a simple & free screen capture tool, that allows you take a snap of your computer screen. The resulting snap you can crop and markup with simple notes. The resulting image can be saved, or copy and pasted into any document or program such as Outlook.
I use it all the time, but the reason I’m writing a blog about it, is that for us – it’s of particular use for our clients providing feedback on websites and other design work. They can take a screenshot of the area of the site they are giving feedback on, and mark up comments. Quite often a picture literally tells a thousand words.
It might change your life
I’ve had one client I’ve introduced Jing to claim it had changed their life. So this might be the most important software you ever install…
You can download it from here http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html
*this program requires .Net framework. This will install automatically if you don’t have it. Nothing to worry about, .Net is Microsoft’s software framework. If you don’t already have it, it will take a little time to install.
Essential Config
Once it’s installed I do recommend opening it up and making these 2 changes. (see screenshot below)
- Tick ‘Hide Jing Sun’ (because that default behavior is crazy annoying – it puts a small icon on the top of your screen)
- Second – Assign a hotkey for Jing. The obvious choice is your keyboard’s “print screen” key.
It’s nuts it doesn’t work this way by default. But once you’ve configured these 2 settings, your all ready to Jing your way into a better tomorrow…
Sorry for the ugly image below. I couldn’t use Jing to take a screenshot, while the Jing options page was on screen. It wouldn’t let me Jing Jing. I couldn’t think of quick way to resolve this paradox, so resorted to taking a photo of my screen.
Basecamp & Jing
One final tip. For ICreate clients in particular. Jing is to Basecamp what Tomato sauce is to steak pies.
Take a screenshot with jing and mark up your comments using it’s tools. Then use it’s save button to save that image to a folder on your computer. (I’ve got a temp directory for this sort of thing). Then you can simply drag this image onto any comment, discussion or task we have in basecamp.