What I like about Jing

I actually know someone with the name Jing kinda odd. Anyway, I’ve been searching for an easy to use screen capture tool for Windows for a while now. I’ve used a few over the years but none of them as easy as Jing. What is Jing you ask? From the Jing site: “The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere”. You can read more in the FAQ. Anyway, I’m always helping people to do one thing or the other at work or trying to explain what is wrong with a program to send to tech support so I needed a program that could take a screenshot of my desktop and allow me to annotate quickly and send it to someone. Jing will allow me to do all this and more. What I like about Jing:

• Ease of use- a few mouse clicks and you can have a screenshot with annotations or video if you like
• Jing sits unobtrusively in the upper right hand corner of my screen, under the menu and out of the way
• Quick annotations- Jing includes a box, highlighter, text and an arrow for adding annotations to an image
• Jing runs on both the Mac & Windows platform so I can use it at home and at work
• Nice UI- the sun is cute and the buttons are large- would be cool if this could be skinned

Be sure to download your copy of choice and check out the Jing Blog. Nice thing is that you don’t have to sign up for a beta and wait to be invited to try it out.

Got my hands on one… but did not get one

I was forced to go to the my local AT&T store today because I was trying to refill my prepaid account and the #9 key on my clunky Nokia phone stopped working for no reason I can think of. Its not like I dialed a bunch of 9s with this phone or anything but for some reason I’ve been having trouble with the number 9 key. Anyway, since I could not do much of anything with the phone I took it in. Whilst there I noticed that they finally had an iPhone display so I went over and decided to tinker with it. There was a guy standing next to me who apparently designs UIs for cell phones and he was taking a good look at the iPhone and admiring the interface. He was fascinated with the phone feature and said that he loved it but could not justify the purchase because all he really would use it for is the phone feature. Her said he wish there was one that just did phone for like $200 or so. I told him that he might get his wish in the near future coz I heard a rumor that Apple was cooking up something along those lines. Anyway, I started playing around with the iPhone a little and I have to tell you I was so nervous I actually dropped the demo unit… good thing that it was attached and did not drop to the floor. Remembering some of the stress tests I saw I wasn’t about to worry. My hands were shaking I just couldn’t help it. Anyway, I remember being wowed by the screen it was so crisp and clear. I fired up the video and was watching an episode of Lost. I wish that I had one of these things when my Mom came to visit this past week and wanted to watch movies. I could have handed it to her instead of disturbing my downstairs neighbors. After a few more minutes of playing with it I went back to what I came there for- to get a new phone. I decided that I could not afford an iPhone at that point no matter how nice it was but I didn’t want a phone that was too expensive either so I could at least save up for the big day when I got an iPhone ( hopefully by then the trim down 2nd gen $200 model or whatever). Anyway, I chose this Sony Erickson flip phone and realized later that my Boss had the same phone. It didn’t bother me any and I decided to take that one and fill it up with some minutes. While I was waiting for the sales person this young man and his Dad came in to return their iPhone b/c apparently they could not get it to activate. I wanted to help them having read all the blogs about activation issues but thought better of it and decided to mind my own business and go home. Ignoring the pounding in my chest I kept my tips to myself and left after paying for my new cell phone with this big smirk on my face.

I’ve got Skitch Invites

After waiting a few long weeks or so I finally got invited to Skitch thanks to Suzanne & her friend Ken. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had much time to play with it as I would like but I really like what I see so far. The interface is intuitive, I like the mark-up tools and I really like the drag me feature where you can drag a picture that you worked on to your desktop or email program. The history feature is also really nice and I like how the window rotates and you can click on a picture in your history to bring it up. If you posted it to myskitch or flickr you can see the url that you posted it to. I haven’t even covered all the features coz I haven’t had time to play with all of them but I have to give this program three thumbs up. It does exactly what I want to do allow me to take a screenshot of my desktop or a picture, throw some illustrations on it and send it via email or save it to disk. My only regret about this program is that there is no Windows version coz I could sure use it at work for all the screenshots I make for how-to manuals, quick mockups, and filing bug reports with consultants and tech support. BTW I have 5 invites to give away so if you need one let me know by replying to this post. Subject should read “interested in skitch invite” so that I don’t trash it as spam.

iPhone Stress Test: What Happens if you dropped this thing on the sidewalk?

PC World has this interesting vide where they put the iPhone through a series of scratch tests and drop tests. I have to say that it was painful to watch them do this to the little iPhone they actually took a key and ran it across the screen of the iPhone as well ad dropped it on the concrete more than a few times. To see the results check out the video. Its not for the faint of heart especially if you own one but a good video nonetheless.