Scopetech

You’re a computer geek browsing the net, perusing your RSS feeds when it happens: one of your less technically inclined friends pops up an IM asking you how to change a password or something other mundane task that might be easy to do but difficult to explain. The point is: you need to decide if you’re going to start typing mile a minute, describing everything to your best ability or rudely log off, blaming it on your crappy internet connection next time you talk. Tech support is enough of a hassle in real life but doing it remotely is mind-numbing at best. Luckily, the folks over at TechSmith feel your pain and have created a great program to help you out. Consider your remote tech support woes forgotten thanks to Jing Project. Jing is a simple way for you to remotely show videos and pictures of any area of your desktop to people via the Internet and using it is dead simple. Check out the install screen shots below.

When you fire up the program, you get the splash which does a slick animation moving to the top of your screen as illustrated by the screen shots below.

What you interact with is this thing looking like half of a sun at the top of your screen.

Mousing over it will expand the three areas to choose from: Capture, History and More.

Choosing Capture will give you this reticle which allows you to decide what area of your desktop you want to capture. It may look confusing but it’s no different than using the lasso in Windows to select multiple folders in an area, just hold down the left mouse button, drag as large an area you want and let go.

Below you can see the area I chose which is in colour, everything that will not be captured will be in black and white. After choosing the area you can choose to do a picture or a video, redo the selection to make a different sized capture area or cancel the process altogether.

This is what happens when you choose the video option, anything that happens in the yellow box is captured, so obviously if you’re trying to show someone how to do something, keep it within the area. You can make this area as large as your entire desktop if you really want and there are 4 options under the box: stop, pause, mute and cancel. If you have a microphone you can have your voice recorded for audio while your desktop is recorded for video, ideal for that remote tech support. If you don’t have a microphone then obviously you’ll get the visual aspect alone. When you’re done, press stop.

Pressing stop takes you to this screen which allows you to preview what the video will look like. You have 3 options below: share, save and cancel. Share will upload to the web where anyone can see your screencast, saving will save the video locally as a .swf file. Let’s upload our video!

Pressing the share button will start the uploading process. If you don’t have an account, making one is effortless and doesn’t take you out of the experience.

 

 

 

Here the “half sun” shows it is uploading your video.

In no time at all your video will be uploaded and you get this notification. The URL will automatically be in your clipboard, so just paste it into your browser and check it out.

Enough pictures, time for you to go try it out yourself! Some minor details if you want to host your stuff to share with people online:

Jing files are hosted on Screencast.com. To use Jing, you’ll need to sign up for a Screencast.com account. This will provide you with 200 MB of storage and 1GB per month of bandwidth. The normal trial account for Screencast.com has a 60 day limit, but to get the most out of the Jing Project, and to share our appreciation for your feedback, we’re offering a trial account with no expiration until the end of the Jing Project (date to be determined).

Overall, I really enjoyed using the product - it’s slick and just plain cool. Be sure to keep an eye on the Jing Project blog and try out the still image feature.

JingProject

Update: You can now digg this story!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 12:34 am and is filed under Programs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.