If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Jing then let me introduce you. Jing is a free screen capture utility. What makes it so wonderful to me is that it’s relatively simple to use yet does exactly what you need it to. There’s no frills but then again that’s not what it’s built for. For serious screen captures I’ll stick to Captivate and Camtasia but for tech support and simple screen grabs Jing is my new best friend. Jing places itself neatly at the top of your monitor. When you’re ready to use it just click and drag the area you want to record. You can choose either .png images or .swf videos. When your finished you can choose to save it, upload it to your server, or places it on flickr or screencast.com. It also has a wonderful feature where you can choose to have the file automagically sent to your clipboard so you can paste it into an email or blog. What’s nice is that when I’m doing tech support or helping a faculty member I can very quickly screen capture my solution, upload it to my server, and paste the link in an email all within a few seconds. Not even the big boys can give me response times like that. I’ve played with it a little and put together a short video displaying the Mythbuntu project I’ve been working on. You can check it out at the link below. The video playing in the screen capture won’t be very smooth due to the lower frame rate of the grab but it isn’t too bad.http://www.tntech.edu/ilearn/jing/mythtv.swf