Screencasting with Jing

jing logo screenshot

The best free software to capture screenshots (static pictures or “photos” of your computer screen) or screencasts (short video clips of what you are doing in your computer screen) is Jing. Techsmith has better paid alternatives (Snagit, Camtasia Studio), but then again, they’re not as cheap as free.

Jing comes in Mac OS X and Windows flavours, is a free download, and you can find lots of information (FAQs) and tutorials on how to use it at the developers’ blog.

In our case, I recommend you to save the captures as files to your Local storage to be later embedded into a webpage.

Many of you have commented on not being able to edit Jing’s SWF videos.

If you want a more powerful application, the “professional”, alternatives to Jing are Adobe Captivate and Camtasia Studio. Both have trial versions that you may want to use. Windows only. These two are not free, obviously.

Enjoy!