I was thinking about all the neat work enhancing products I have been coming across lately and how fast things are moving in the world of technology. From plants that twitter water needs to digital assistants controlled by email and cell phones it’s really exciting. Some of the things being done with Wii Remotes is also amazing - I’m excited to see where all of these technologies will begin to cross. So I started thinking. What one piece of software, if you took it out of my personal life and my business life would I miss.
Now don’t panic, Not OS related, but our new breeds of tools we’re seeing- a productivity tool or enhancement to existing products that might be different then other productive people might work. So Outlook, Internet Explorer etc are all excluded.
For me it really didn’t take long. I’d have to say hands down, without a doubt the Jing project from TechSmith and the best thing of all - basic use is free. The paid version of the service adds file storage space and is very reasonable. The best thing for me - I’m way over due to provide feedback I promised to Bill Scanlon at TechSmith back in October when he askd me to elaborate on how I’ve changed the way I work because of Jing, so I get to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone. I hope your listening Bill!
Hey Bill:
Let me get back to you on that. I would really like to think on that and give you a quality example.
We are a start up bringing an application to market, we use it in bug tracking and case instructions.
Better yet, when I’m ready, I’ll JING you.
Dave
Many of you may already be familiar with TechSmith or one of their products - SnagIt (which by the way is an awesome product). The Jing project is a free screen capture recording application. It captures audio and everything you do on the screen and then provides source code to embed or my favorite, share feature. Share loads it to the TechSmith servers and you are given a link to paste into IM, email or anything. It loads really quick and the capture quality is as near perfect as I can tell. So without sounding too much like a TechSmith commercial - here’s the ways Jing has integrated into my life in the last 8 or 9 months. I work smarter, faster and do less iteration in my communication. In case you are wondering, my company does email marketing and we moved to their paid service through Screen Cast - this product is just that good.
I gravitate more to SnagIt for the image / screen capture without video - but where Jing shines for me is the voice over screen capture with simple playback and share abilities.
Some ways I use Jing:
Family members who don’t speak “my language”
I use Jing whenever it’s difficult to communicate. For instance. My father in law is a truck driver and knows just enough about computers to get in trouble. So when he asked me for help selling his RV I had know idea what I was in for - The first challenge we faced was images. He knew how to send emails, but didn’t know how to attach an image. After about a 2 minute phone call I told him I’d Jing him! Of course he wanted to know what I said, I promptly ended the call and said just click on the link I sent you and watch the video and make sure your speakers are on. He got the link and watched the brief tutorial I had given him via jing and I had the pictures in 10 minutes with hardly a hassle.
I’ve used Jing to discuss or give feedback on a document
It’s simple to open an excel sheet or word document and just go over an outline and basically give one sided feedback in real-time. See my Jing in bullet 5 - to see some mark up tools that can help.
Document bugs and case feedback
I use it to log recordings of behavior in our software and log tickets. Instead of relying on just text, we try to communicate or show the problem or suggestion. It seems to make sure there are no assumptions or misunderstandings. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked for x and got y only to read my write up and found I got Z (This is always funny and I noticed it’s recently evolved (Software Product Development Life Cycle). Here’s a sample of Jack Blovits our support and implementation director Jinging (That’s the verb for “creating a jing screencast”) to our team about a user interface design improvemtent - See Jack’s Jing
Show others what I’m looking at or trying to work through.
Sometimes when I get stuck, I ask a team member or friend for help. It’s often just so easy to send an email or IM and say, can you look at this? The best thing is there’s no download for the user - just a minimal wait time while it posts to your account. It personalizes the electronic communication and adds just a flavor of really coolness. I have given this product recommendation to many many people and everyone always thanks me.
To quickly communicate ideas and needs to clients
Here’s a JING I did for a client a couple of days back as we were working through an email campaign, it’ll give you a pretty clear picture and set the fuse of ideas buring.
View My Jing to Jonn Karsseboom
Here’s the AIR ScreenBoard download for the mark up tool used in this Jing as well. This is an adobe, beta or sample application you can download from Adobe Labs with full source access - Thanks Christian Cantrell. I was strugling with using the mouse too much and nauseating people with circling mouses, as my habit of talking with my hands tends to translate into talking with my mouse. As you can see from the post I’m still talking with my mouse, now it just paints too - I’ll have to try harder. Using this tool will definately help get your point accross, It’s not very user friendly and you’ll have to use the ALT + SHIFT keyboard to get the application out of focus, but I haven’t had time to clean it up and make it play nicer yet with windows, maybe one of you can help 
I hope you enjoy Jinging as much as we do!
I’d love to hear what products that are out of the mainstream hat you are using for productivity and life enhancement. Please comment and share.
If you haven’t checked out Buzzword yet - do so now, it is a serious future threat to MS Word. You are probably quite aware that web applications are gaining momentum towards becoming “everyday” mission critical applications. Buzzword is a remarkable application and example. While it doesn’t offer the bells and whistles for “super users” that Word does, it’s a pretty great application with a super intuitive interface, but enough of buzzword - as it continues to mature it will no doubt earn even more fans.
