Jing, a Free and Simple Way to Create Screencasts

Jing is an application that makes throwing together a screencast a breeze. Even better, it’s free and runs on both Windows and Mac OS X.

My Story

I encountered an API bug with one of my vendors, and support was unable to reproduce the problem with my written instructions. I needed a better way of conveying the information I had to demonstrate the issue. I turned to the excellent SnapzProX, but a $69 price tag for something that I only use twice a year was unacceptable. After a substantial amount of Google keyword tweaking, I finally uncovered the Jing Project. Jing allowed me to throw together a brief presentation demonstrating the steps to reproduce the problem. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a screencast with audio is priceless.

Features

I won’t verbosely list the features of Jing here, because the website does a more elegant job of that. However, I will note that the free version only exports a flash video. I found this to be more than sufficient for my needs, but if you need more power, like the ability to export H.264, then a reletively inexpensive Pro version is available.