Jing is such a new idea that we figured many people would have questions about it. This is our first shot at answering some of the questions we think you might have.
Is Jing a product? Not exactly. Is Jing a “beta”? Well, it’s not exactly that either. Jing is a concept that we’re evaluating to see if it can improve everyday conversations. Determining if Jing will be a product is what we are trying to do by gathering feedback from people like you. We think it’s a great way to improve daily conversations via email, IM chats and blog posts.
Well, if you want the walk-through, check out this video and the getting-started stuff here.
If you’re wondering, “How in the world am I ever going to use this thing called ‘Jing’?” then here’s an explanation from Tony Dunckel, the Jing Product (err, Project) Manager:
“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.”
“Your content is hosted on Screencast.com, for which we are providing a complimentary account to all participants during this project. Users have 200MB of space for storing screenshots and screencasts and 1 GB of bandwidth that renews monthly. The Screencast.com account will remain available to you for the duration of the project.”
Screencast.com is a web hosting service from TechSmith Corporation. It’s a premier (which means we’re serious about doing a good job) hosting service specifically made for screen video content. It does not change or diminish the resolution of your content. It provides detailed permissions that you can administer so you control who can access your media and you retain ownership of the media you upload. Screencast.com serves as the web hosting backend to the Jing Project, enabling TechSmith to provide you with instant hosting and sharing of your content.
Anyone may use Jing. We are currently offering this to the general public for the duration of the test.
We have not set an exact end date for the Jing project as this may continue right into a product offering from TechSmith. Any content created with Jing during the evaluation period will continue to be available to you on Screencast.com for a reasonable grace period, during which time you have access to your content to take with you. Or, if you prefer, you can continue to keep your content on Screencast.com under one of the paid plans.
It’s free for now!
Yeah, didn’t think you’d let us slide with that last answer… so … here’s the deal; Jing isn’t a product right now—it’s a project. What we’re trying to do is give this to the world and figure out whether it fills a need or provides a useful service. We’re asking for both your participation and feedback on this concept, so the least we can do is provide the Jing Project complimentary during this period. As we learn what you want from this, we’ll have a better idea what the pricing and business model might look like in the future.
We thought about that, but we realized that Jing might become more than what it is right now; hence we decided to call it a project. We felt that labeling it as beta might infer intentions that aren’t yet determined. We have some ideas, but they’re changing regularly, so grab the RSS feed to our blog to get breaking news as it comes.
You bet. It would be rather silly of us to think we could conduct a public test on improving digital conversations and only invite one platform to participate. We realize for this to be successful, we have to be as platform-independent as possible. Sorry, no Linux support.
Currently, Jing is the only offering we have running on the Macintosh platform. However, we are definitely seeing an increased demand for our products on the Mac and are continuously evaluating our future priorities. You can learn more about TechSmith’s efforts on the Mac platform by visiting http://www.techsmith.com/macdevelopment.asp.
Here’s what we run and it seems to work great: Intel Dual Core processors (both on the PC and Mac) with at least a gig of RAM. Your mileage may vary.
If time is on your side, feel free to use dialup, otherwise we recommend a broadband connection.
