Ever since I no longer have a Mac at work, I’ve been seriously missing several functions that certain apps gave me on OSX. Skitch is one of those apps that gave me superior screenshot ability, to be able to take a partial screenshot, annotate right then and there with text and arrows, and then just drag the image into an email or onto the desktop or wherever.
Last night, a friend mentioned he’s been using Jing on OSX, and that there’s a Windows version available. pity there’s no Linux support.
Speaking only of the Windows version here, Jing is not quite as feature-rich as Skitch is on OSX, but it there are certain things it does better, such as selecting a window to capture, instead of, like in Skitch, having to precision-select a box around the window.
Other really useful functions, however, Jing has, where the last version of Skitch I used, didn’t. It has auto-uploads to Flickr, or to Jing’s own screencast.com. Jing can also record video in the specified selected area on-screen, so you can do screencasts and upload them wherever, including capturing of the microphone.
Jing is a magic little app, and even though it’s not something I do every day, it’s a nice addition to an arsenal of little apps that just improve every day (and not so everyday) life on your Mac or Windows PC.
And yes, Jing is free.
4 comments
Allan says:
19 July 2008 at 11:38 (UTC 2 )
I actually tried Jing for a while and didn’t like it. Of course I said the same about Skitch until you mentioned it again and my opinion of that has changed mightily. The one thing that made me try Jing was the video capture option. I trialed it as a free option of iShowU, but the quality wasn’t great.
You should try the new Skitch, it now allows you to post it immediately to skitch.com, flickr, FTP, SFTP or WebDav. I also miss the ability to grab a window, as well as being able to screengrab a menu that’s dropped down. As soon as you switch to Skitch the menu pops back up. For both of those I still use Shift + Ctrl + Apple + 4 and then just paste it straight into Skitch for annotation and uploading goodness. I must admit that the drag to save anywhere function is just so simple and obvious.
aubrey says:
19 July 2008 at 13:03 (UTC 2 )
Skitch has a countdown timer option to capture, 5 seconds I think, enough time to get that menu down for the screencap.
I haven’t seen the quality of video for Jing yet. But it doesn’t have to be HD quality though does it?
Allan says:
19 July 2008 at 17:16 (UTC 2 )
good point about the countdown.
Becky says:
11 February 2009 at 03:55 (UTC 2 )
Just for the sake of future googlers, Skitch does now have the ability to easily snap a window: just click anywhere on the window. You can even choose whether you want it to have a drop-shadow or not.
Anyway, I came here because a friend was asking me about a Skitch-like app for Windows. Thanks for the heads-up on Jing!