Antair Games An independent game developer blog

When I was setting up my new PC the other day, rather than move my old copies of Camtasia and Snag-it over, I decided to give Jing a try instead.

The three obvious nice things about Jing are that it does both jobs (screen recording and screenshots), it works on both the Mac and Windows, and it’s free.

So far I’m impressed, it seems to work well and the interface is very simple. First you get a little tool button stuck to the edge of your screen somewhere:-

If you select capture, you get a little cursor to select the area of the screen you’re interested in, then you get a menu where you can choose to capture a video or images.

The next screen lets you quickly figure out what you want to do with the thing you captured, send it to the clipboard, save it, or upload it to the free online repository they give you. You can also access a history of recent captures, so you can stock up a few clips or shots and then decide what to do with them later.

I haven’t had any problems so far (though a quicker way to get images out of the history viewer would be a big help - drag and drop would make it really useful), and for simple screen capture and/or recording, this seems like a totally viable free option.