This week I'm cheating. I'm dipping into the Jing feedback folder to respond to a few similar questions, and draw attention to the fact that Jing and Screencast.com are connected for a reason.

In fact, I could use this opportunity to point out that everyone who uses Jing should ALWAYS use Screencast.com as their hosting/sharing solution...but I'm biased of course. (for those who don't know, I'm the product manager for both Jing and Screencast.com :)) Even I know that users of Jing and other content creation tools have reasons for using those tools in their own way. I recently conducted several user interviews where I got to watch how people use Jing in their daily lives and the results pleasantly surprised me. I saw a lot of content being captured with Jing and then sent to Snagit and Camtasia Studio for further editing before being published to Screencast.com and other destinations. That's the kind of workflow that not everyone understands, but when you do, it opens your eyes to the unlimited possibilities that now exist.

Anyway, I digress. Here are two comments from Jing users that I hope this post can address:

By the way, I used Jing to take these snapshots and I sent the images to Snagit to make the neat curled edge effect. From Snagit's editor, I then sent the images to my Screencast.com account which immediately returned to me the HTML embed code that I pasted into this article. Simple, eh (that's for you Sharon)?

Ok, now on to the response: FOLDERS! Everyone needs to organize their content, and Screencast.com gives you a great way to do that with the Screencast.com object we call Folders. We thought folders were so cool, we even let you create them in our other content creation tools like Jing, Snagit, Camtasia Studio, and Camtasia Relay. "But where ARE they?" you might ask...

Folders are accessible in Jing through the Button Settings dialog in the Preferences section of Jing's More ball:

The idea is that, from within our tools, you can create a unique button for each folder to which you want to send content. Click on the button you want to customize, or click New to create a new button:

From here you can pick from any of the folders that are in your Screencast.com account, or you can choose to edit folders directly. This would allow you to create a new folder in your Screencast.com account, that you would then select back in the Jing interface.

Jing is smart, so if you have a folder that is private (requiring a password or user authentication to access it), you won't be able to have the button retrieve embed code. Embedding content is only allowed from Public or Hidden folders (Your Jing folder is a hidden folder on Screencast.com). You can have up to eight (8) buttons appear in your Jing preview window:

Now that I've demonstrated one way to use TechSmith's online hosting and sharing solution to do your organizing - what if you wanted to create a unique button to save your content into different local file system destinations (or FTP directories, or Facebook accounts, or...)? You can create new buttons that have unique file paths to your hard drive, FTP site, or Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Flickr accounts.

We're always interested in hearing what you have to say, so at this point I guess I should quit yammering on and let you, the readers, tell us what you like or don't like about this particular point of integration. So let us have it! And of course, Happy Screencasting (and Jinging!).
- Dirk