For the last couple of months I’ve been looking for cheap (free) screen capturing tools and services in “the cloud” (internet) to deploy and publish screencasts.
And I have finally found one, and it’s damn god. I have always known that Camtasia is an eminent piece of software for screen capturing, but it’s expensive. TechSmith have started a project called the JingProject and it seems to me that its Camtasia stripped down to its birthday suite. You can do basic screen capturing with it and record voice, but there aren’t yet any features to edit the screencast after the capture – at least you have a cheap tool.
It isn’t the screen capturing feature or that it’s free that make the JingProject a killer app, but it’s the feature to deploy and share screencast on the internet that make this application a real killer app. You create a screencast and then within the application upload it to the Screencast.com service. When it’s uploaded you can share it by give away the URL or embed a flash player in your webpage with the screencast as the content.
Visual Studio 2008 Hello World screencast
Here you see a screencast I've created with Jing. I've uploaded the screencast to Screencast.com and used an embedded flash player to embed the screencast into my blog post.
You should all check it out! It’s awesome!
You can find Screencast.com training videos here.