Webninja.org

i’ve found it!

I was on a training session last week with a company for data cleansing software we purchased from the company he works for. I love the chance to have a discussion with other tech people, specifically ones that have their head on their shoulders. With Brandon’s departure, I find myself having less of these conversations at work. Over the years, I’ve come across few but usually have excellent discussions about other programs. Vincent from Spillman introduced me to Beryl (now Compiz Fusion), and just recently, Rick from matchIT suggested a program that will probably change this website specifically.

In my last post, i made mention of wanting a utility that does it all for me. lets me take a screenshot, crop it, add a border, then upload it to my ftp. The Jing Project has completely met all of my expectations when it comes to this solution. Jing comes from TechSmith, the company that created the popular screen capture program SnagIt. It’s a great application but comes with a $49.95 price tag that makes it not worth it to me, let alone the average consumer. Instead, Jing is totally free. I assumed there had to be a catch somewhere, but my up front assumption is TechSmith is considering ways to make an application free for the home user, and get away with something such as advertising when images are linked to. At the moment, there’s none of that either.

I’m getting ahead of myself though so I’ll start first my explaining how it works. You have 2 options, an annoying (to me at least) sun orbital at the top of your primary screen, or you can set a hot key. Personally, I’m using Control-PrintScreen. Upon hitting the key combination, the screen is grayed out and you draw a box over the area. I would have loved to show a screen shot of this, but print screen wouldn’t dump this to clipboard. After you pick the area, you decide image or video (which creates an swf file). Next you get this screen:

Now you may have noticed the FTP highlighted. With Jing you have the option to create a free account at Screencast.com with 2 gigs of storage, or dump it to your flickr account, ftp, or straight file. Since I’ll be using it for ftp I predefined my login info, where I wanted my screenshots to go, etc. Then you have multiple choices. The first icon uploads the file and copies the direct link to your clipboard. The second copies an embed link (think <img> tag, which you can also change for example if you wanted to us bbcode [img] tags) The third saves to disk, and the last option puts it in your clipboard. Along with this you can perform small changes such as creating a text label, highlighting areas of the screen shot, or even creating a frame (like the above screen shot)

So in other words, I’ve not simplified posting screenshots tenfold. I wish I could find applications like this every day.