Friday, November 11, 2011

Using Jing To Record Videos

For the past few weeks I have been using Jing, a screencast tool available from TechSmith. Jing comes in two flavours: Free and Pro. I use the free edition. If you purchase the Pro version you do get the ability to save videos in MPEG-4 format (the free edition only allows you to create SWF files).

I learnt about Jing after reading this blog article on the Telerik site. They use Jing to record the progress of features completed by developers. This provides instant feedback to the team on how a feature has been implemented. I really like that idea and started to use it at work, though I’ve been recording videos to help document how I resolved some customer issues which are reported to us. I’ve also recorded videos which show how to configure IIS for client who wanted 301 redirects for certain url’s on their site. The videos have proved really useful, no to mention the amount of time saved when compared to writing out documentation by hand!