Disruptive Conversations

Have you ever been in an IM or email conversation and wanted to quickly show someone a screenshot or screencast/video of something on your screen?  But didn't want to go through the hassle of saving a file and then uploading it or attaching it?  Or you wanted to add something to your Twitter feed but didn't want to put the image somewhere first?

Well, yesterday the folks over at TechSmith (makers of SnagIT and Camtasia Studio) released an "experiment" to do just that in the form of a project called Jing at the URL www.jingproject.com.  As they talk about on the Jing blog, and also on the TechSmith Visual Lounge blog, this is truly an experiment in how to enhance communication:

The Jing Project is our journey to discover how we can improve everyday conversation. Think of all those IM chats, emails, blog posts and comments you’ve made over the years. Now imagine a more visual world where integrating screen captures and screencasts into those took nothing more than a matter of seconds. Can you imagine it? I can - I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it - it’s Jing.

Our goal is to explore this with all of you and together see how we can bridge the visual world and our daily conversations into a richer, more effective way to communicate.

I have to say I'd admire any company that experiments publicly (although one could argue that pretty much all of "Web 2.0" is one big "beta") and they have been very up front about the fact that Jing is really a "proof-of-concept" more than a "product"... they aren't sure what this will turn into, what the business model will be, etc.  They are more just throwing it out there to watch what people do with it.

So what is "Jing"?  Well, essentially it is a screen capture program that sits on your Windows or Mac and, when triggered, captures an image or records a video/screencast - and then uploads the image/video to screencast.com and... this is the key... gives you a URL on your clipboard that you can paste into an IM chat, email, Twitter post, whatever.  So the Jing logo I have above is now also available as a screenshot at:

http://www.screencast.com/t/PrPAEoQdZ

It's pretty cool in that you can just make a quick screen capture or a quick video/screencast.  For instance, here's an incredibly riveting video of me updating my status on Facebook:

http://www.screencast.com/t/Fk_6Th17s

Now, not terribly exciting in a blog, where I can just embed a video, but could be quite useful in an IM chat, Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce post or an email. For instance, just this morning I used it to email my corporate help desk and included a pointer to a screen capture of my Task Manager while trying to diagnose some performance problems. (And being security paranoid as I am, I didn't have an issue putting the screen cap on an external server because it didn't really show anything about my machine other than the fact that I'm pushing my laptop way beyond what I should! ;-)

  Since it's hosted on screencast.com, you can actually login there and then find other ways to share the screencast or screen capture.  For instance, I can do the much more blog-appropriate thing and embed the screencast right here:

So in my limited experimentation, I can definitely see the use for it.  The one "catch" that some of the others playing with the released version have latched onto is that right now it is tied to screencast.com, which actually is a commercial hosting service that you have to pay $70/year to have an account there.  Right now, and according to TechSmith "for the life of the Jing project", however long that may be, you don't have to pay to use it.  This is again an experiment and TechSmith seems to be figuring out how or if they can turn this into a business.  At the moment, Jing and the associated hosting on screencast.com is free.

Now the program does show its pre-release rough edges a bit when you first download and install it.  For one thing, because it uses Windows Presentation Framework on a PC you have to download Microsoft .Net 3.0 which took a while and was a separate install process.  The other major issue I had was that once you do the install... it seems like nothing happens.  If you are an astute observer (or have been clued in by someone) you will notice that you now have a new icon in your systray -   If you click on that icon and choose "Preferences" you get the big yellowish-orangish ball that you see in the image on the right.  Yes, that's the preferences screen. (The TechSmith folks are perhaps going a bit overboard on the "experiment" angle, although it is at least interesting to see someone thinking about a different UI for dialog boxes.)  The middle button gets you into the preferences where you can create a screencast.com account and set up a hot key to trigger the Jing capture.  (And yes, I submitted feedback with my concerns about some of the UI roughness.)  When you are done, you press the checkmark icon and you're set to go.

After that, it's just a matter of triggering Jing to take a capture.  You do that either through the hot key you assigned or through the strange little ball (half-circle, really) that appears at the top middle of your screen above all other windows in the title bar area:

When you go up to that ball with your mouse, it expands and you can initiate the capture. (Funny, but I can't seem to find a way to capture a video of it because the ball disappears as soon as you start the capture.)  Personally, I'm a keyboard guy, so configuring it to be Ctrl+Shift+S worked fine for me.

I guess my only major knock is  that even just sitting there idle waiting to be triggered Jing seems to consume about 15-20% of my CPU (per Task Manager). The TechSmith folks seem to think this is related to .Net 3.0 but it is a bit annoying (see previous mention of performance problems on laptop).

All in all, I think it's an interesting "experiment" and it's great that TechSmith has made it available for people to play with.  It's definitely still got some rough edges, but I know that the TechSmith folks are currently drowning in feedback right now so I'd expect they'll be making some changes.   I don't know how much I'll honestly use it, in part because I'm a bit reluctant to put content on a service where I'm not sure how long the service will be available... but I will continue to experiment with it when I have the need to add visuals into IM or other communication.

Could you see yourself using something like this which makes it easy to include images or video?  What do you think about it?

 UPDATE: There is a good amount of conversation going on right now about Jing. Some posts you may find interesting:

• Tris Hussey - Jing could make sending a screenshot or screencast painless
• Lifehacker - Take and share screenshots and screencasts with Jing Project
• Lockergnome - Jing! Timing is everything

Question for you all - what do you use to incorporate screen captures into your blog entries?

For a variety of reason, I like to incorporate images into my posts.  Sometimes it is just the logo of the company/product/service that I am discussing[1].  Sometimes it is a part of a web page or program screen (here's an example).  In any event, my highly unsophisticated process of getting those graphics right now on my Windows XP PC is to do the following:

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+PrntScrn to copy the current open window to the Clipboard.
2. Switch to Windows Paint and paste the image into the window.
3. Click on one of the other tools (like the eraser) so that I de-select the entire area and then click on the selection box again.
4. Select the region I want to copy and then do the standard copy to Clipboard.
5. Switch to Windows Live Writer (my current blogging editor of choice) and paste the graphic into my blog entry.

Like I said... not very sophisticated, but it works well.  However, I'd like to simplify it a bit - ideally drop it down to simply my steps #4 and #5, i.e. select a region of the screen and then paste it into WLW. 

Unfortunately, there doesn't yet seem to be a WLW plugin that does what I want, although this plugin seems quite close if I feel like dropping $39 for TechSmith's SnagIt program (and perhaps I will).  It sounds like Vista has a built-in utility for doing this, but I don't have Vista and don't foresee getting it for some time.

What do you all use?  How do you bring in screen captures?  logos?  etc.?  [2]

Thanks in advance.

[1] And sometimes a logo can be brought in by simply right-clicking it in Firefox, choosing "Copy Image" and pasting it into my blog editor.  But sometimes the colors don't work and sometimes a site doesn't make a logo easy to get this way - the logo is part of a much larger image or embedded in Flash... so you need to capture that part of the screen to get the logo.

[2] And Mac users, please don't bother telling me that this is: a) trivial and built-in on the Mac; or b) I should get a Mac and run Parallels to use Windows and again would be able to do it.  I get it, okay... I understand the belief that Macs are superior for graphics.  But that doesn't help change the fact that my corporate laptop is a Windows XP box!

Over at Saunderslog, I have been curious about how Alec Saunders was getting a watermark of his URL across the bottom of his blog images, as shown on the right in the quick screenshot I took of the twitter window. I thought he might be using some new feature in Flickr or in some other editing program. In any event, it turns out to be a feature of Microsoft's Windows Live Writer beta which he is using.  The funny thing is that I'm using WLW as well, but had not yet discovered this interesting little feature. (Nor is it clearly mentioned on the WLW information page.)

Using this watermarking capability is remarkably simple. First you insert your image into WLW, which might just be a simple "Paste" from another program.  As shown in the screenshot on the left, when you click on the image to select it, you get a sidebar for the "Image Properties".  I use the first and second tabs all the time, but had never played with the third "Effects" tab.

Ta da... click on the green "+" sign to get a drop-down menu, choose "Overlays" and then "Watermark".  Enter the URL and change the font and sizing and you're done!

What's nice is that WLW is changing the image itself versus using CSS or something like that... which is what I would want it to do, so it's great to see. 

Since I was exploring this third tab, I also now noticed that under the "+" sign there is a "Transformations" menu with a number of image effects, such as "Black&White", "Sepia", "Sharpen", "Blur", etc.  Now I typically do such manipulation in some other program (like Google's Picasa), but it's nice to know these are here if I just want a quick change to an image.

So thanks, Alec, for pointing me to something I already had and just hadn't fully explored.

As to Windows Live Writer, what I don't get is why the WLW blog hasn't been updated since November.  Has Microsoft stopped development on it? Or paused their work?   There does seem to be activity in their forum... it's just curious that there have been no blog posts in, now, almost four months.  Puzzling...