StigmergicWeb

Thanks to a tweet from Alec, I’ve just been taking a look at Jing Project, a quick and easy way to produce screencasts. It comes from TechSmith, who produce the very slick Camtasia. I’ve long been wishing there was as good a product available for Macs for producing screencasts; I’ve used SnapzX Pro which runs quite nicely and produces good quality quicktime movies as an output. My two main complaints about it were that it didn’t run as a native Intel app on Macs, and it didn’t produce output in formats other than quicktime. The first issue has been resolved - Snapz Pro is now Intel native (this was just announced at the end of June). I’d really like to have flash output, to make integration of screencasts into web pages as easy as can be.

Enter Jing. The Jing app is cross-platform, and it integrates seamlessly with screencast.com, TechSmith’s hosting service for screencasts and still screen captures. The screencasts/captures can also be saved to the local hard drive. Screencasts are saved as flash (.swf) format, but there are tools around that can handle the conversion (I just can’t think of any off the top of my head).

According to the Jing project blog, Jing is not an application:

we realized that Jing might become more than what it is right now; hence we decided to call it a project. We felt that labeling it as beta might infer intentions that aren’t yet determined. We have some ideas, but they’re changing regularly, so grab the RSS feed to our blog to get breaking news as it comes.

Sounds like some semantic dodginess, but I suppose if they want to call it a wombat, I don’t much care as long as it runs on my Mac.

As a proof of concept, I very quickly made up a screencast about checking the battery level of a bluetooth mouse on a Mac. The production went very quickly, and uploading it to screencast.com was perfectly seamless after I created an account. There seemed to be some issues with SnapzX on my first try, but after I rebooted and shut off SnapzX all seemed tickety-boo.

I’m not sure what the final status of the project will be, but I have some ideas/suggestions. It looks like this is going to be a killer app! I think that if Jing is a low-cost or no-cost application, the adoption rate will be very high. If TechSmith is smart, they would do this and make their money through paid hosting plans at screencast.com. Another business plan might be to charge a higher price for the app, but provide some free hosting for the screencasts. I think the former plan would be the best for users and for TechSmith. King Gillette figured this one out over a hundred years ago, and the companyand brand is still going strong.

And if you’re interested, here’s my bluetooth battery level screencast.