Jing is a tool that allows you to capture still and video images of your desktop. One way of looking at this tool is as a screencasting tool, but it also incorporates a feature that allows you to share your capture instantly via a link. This can be useful say in a chat session with a friend. Maybe you want to explain or demo a tool you are discussing. Using Jing you can quickly invoke the tool, capture some video along with your narration. When Jing is finished capturing and processing the video, it also places a URL to the video on your clipboard that you can paste into your chat client (or Twitter, or email...) and share with the person you are talking to. The other day Steve Burt and I were on iChat and I used it to illustrate how it works. It was much easier just to show him. EXAMPLE Screencast... I can see using this quite a bit with my staff. Especially when one of the printers goes down and they need to select another one... :-) The ability to easily capture, post, and then send the URL is pretty slick.

The Jing web site explains it this way...

“Think of Jing as a supplement to all your chat discussions, email threads, forum posts and blog entries. It sits nicely on your desktop, ready to capture and share your stuff at a moment’s notice. Simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently places a URL to your content on your clipboard ready for you to paste the URL into any of your conversations.”

By way of Tony Vincent via Twitter...