Lately, when I booted my machine, I saw this dialog appear:

Learn Jing Now? No thanks, I already know how to use Jing. So… what other options do I have?

• “Replay”
• “Sign Up Now”

That’s it. The usual Minimize-Maximize-Close buttons from Windows aren’t there, and I don’t see a Close button. Replay just starts the tutorial video again, and Sign Up Now sounds like I have to register for something . I already created a Screencast account – I remember doing that specifically to satisfy Jing. So, as far as I know, I don’t need to sign up. Yet, the text above the Sign Up Now button seems to suggest that I should click it… but I know I already signed up, why would I do it again?  Because of the resulting confusion, I see the dialog as having a poor user interface. While it is visually appealing, I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to click. I’ve also been trained to avoid registration forms – I only use them when I absolutely have to. After all, each time I register somewhere – it takes time, and the information I provide could be exposed in one more location.

If I decide I want to close the window, I have to get creative… I can either:

• Right-click the window in the taskbar, and select Close Window.
• Press ALT+F4.
• Open Task Manager, and kill the process from there.

It could have been easily averted with a Close button, or at least clearer instructions.  If I have to sign up again to use Jing, then tell me why. If I have to click that button to get to the login page, then that’s terrible – just put a Login button alongside Sign Up Now. Either way, make it clear.

Snipping Tool (Windows Vista only)

I was surprised to discover a new screen capture tool from Microsoft, already preloaded on my Vista machine… sounded cool. When you run it, it grays out the screen, and the interface pops up:

The Snipping Tool interface

You can then drag the cursor and select an area to capture. It even has “free-form”, “rectangular”, “full-screen”, and “window” selection modes.

Selecting the are to capture with Snipping Tool

Whatever you select is then presented to you, and you have the option of saving it in a number of formats. Not bad, Microsoft, not bad. Unfortunately, there is no way to capture the cursor. I was starting to wonder if this was particularly difficult to achieve. I found a webpage that mentions the following:

Because of the way graphic interfaces work, your cursor usually isn’t captured in an image. Pressing the Print Screen key will not capture your cursor. But all commercial programs that do captures do have some kind of option to capture the cursor.

But there’s a trick—screen capture programs can’t really see the cursor, either. So what they must do is add their own special cursor, and because cursors change shape, if you want a special cursor, you need to tell the program what cursor to capture. Each program has its own way to do this.

Funny thing is, I had that approach in mind – achieving it via image manipulation, but I wanted to avoid it, since it isn’t a convenient long-term solution. Reading what he had to say really made me want to know how the cursor works altogether – why is it so different? I’ll take some time to look into that, and will write a post about it afterwards. For now, back to the tools:

Jing

Jing is actually from TechSmith, the same guys that make SnagIt. Interestingly, they have a free version to offer. I found the interface particularly unique, unlike anything I’ve seen before.  It features a “sun” icon that you can place anywhere on the outer bounds of your screen. Once placed, when you hover over the icon, it expands to show you more controls, as seen here:

Left: The sun icon being dragged ; Right: Extra controls upon hover

 To get a better idea of what the application really looks like, check out their entertaining intro video.  Put simply, Jing allows you to capture part or all of your desktop as either an image or a video. It then gives you options to annotate, and all-that; but he’s the cool part. You can automatically upload your recorded videos (which include audio) to a website, which then allows you to easily share it via a link.

Unfortunately for me, Jing’s screenshot functionality didn’t include the mouse cursor. After discovering this, with yet another application, an interesting idea popped into my head. Surely, the video feature would feature the mouse cursor – otherwise the video feature would be pretty useless. I tested my theory, and I was right. So, theoretically, I could take a screenshot of a video, and then I’d have the mouse cursor captured as well. Sneaky, I know – but it did the trick.

So, all-in-all, I didn’t find a tool that did exactly what I wanted, but the “take a screenshot of the video” idea was actually easy enough to do – so I’ll probably use that approach whenever necessary; that is, until I give in to SnagIt.