Technically Speaking

TechSmith corporation has released an update to Jing, the free screen capture/video capture tool. I ranted in January about a code change in that release that really bugged me. TechSmith responded here on my blog, and via e-mail, and today’s update addresses that issue (thank you TechSmith!) but introduces a couple more issues for me. But lets take them one at a time.

First, my original complaint with the January update was that when you created videos with small pixel dimensions (because you don’t want to capture the whole screen), when somebody tries to view the video directly (not embedded in a web page), the video expanded to the full screen.

This was a problem for me because one of the VPs in my company has a 30″ screen. If I’ve grabbed a video of a bug that happens in our software, and attach it to the bug report, when the VP tries to view the video of the bug, it is expanded something like 10x its captured size, which is hard to follow and looks terrible.

The release of Jing I installed today fixes that issue! Now when you directly view a Jing SWF file (say it is attached to the bug and the developer clicks on it to view it), small videos don’t expand to the width of the screen. Large videos do, but I can’t figure out where the breaking point is. And frankly, I’m okay with that. It was my small videos (in terms of pixel dimensions) that I was concerned about. So, a big thank you to TechSmith for listening and taking swift action on this issue.

My only gripes, and these are minor, are that first,  I wish the control bar that is added to the SWF file was placed below the capture region, instead on top of the bottom part of the capture region. Take this video for example.

Is there a reason that the controls cover up the bottom part of the captured image? If so, you ought to warn us that the bottom part won’t be visible, so we know to grab a taller portion.

My second gripe is that when I updated to the latest version, Jing lost all my button customizations. I had created several buttons to directly FTP content to my web server in a particular folder, or other buttons to save files on the network share in a specific folder. I’m going to have to remember what those were and re-create the buttons. In the first place, Jing shouldn’t have deleted these, and in the second place, if Jing really needed to delete these when it upgraded, it should have warned me first so that I was at least aware that I was going to lose my user-configured settings.

However, when I updated my second computer, these settings were saved. So there is a chance that this was user error, because for one computer it works like I want it to, but for the other one, it deleted my custom buttons. Ah well.

So my final review in a nutshell: great update, especially if you capture small pixel dimension videos. Great job TechSmith. Be aware, however, that the upgrade *might* totally erase all your custom buttons. Probably it won’t. Unless you do whatever it was I did. Anyway, thanks TechSmith!

TechSmith produces a couple of tools that are important in my tech writing workflow including Snagit (probably the best stand-alone screen capture software available, in my opinion) and Jing (a simple program for sharing quick screen captures and screencasts (video).

I complained last week about Jing’s latest release, and how when I capture small videos and play the SWF file directly, the video scales to the browser viewport size. So videos that I had captured at 300×200 pixels were being displayed six times their size in my web browser, and like 10 times their size on my boss’s monitor.

I’ve had an extended conversation with TechSmith’s support department over this issue, and then yesterday I received an e-mail from a developer who is working to resolve the problem.

We’ve now written back and forth a couple of times, discussing ideas to resolve the problem.

I’ll wait until the next release of Jing to decide what I think about this whole issue, but I wanted you to know that what I think TechSmith is getting right, so far, is  how they are handling my complaint. I feel like my concern has been not only heard, but is being acted upon.

In the end, TechSmith will have to make a decision on how to proceed based on what they think is best. But at least I know that my voice has been heard and considered.

Thanks, TechSmith.