Everybody know how to “printscreen”.  Lots of people also know some small soft or plugin which helps creating a screen capture. But those are usually so time consuming!

For instance, when I had to send some comments to my designers, I had to make a “print screen” of the web page, paste it into illustrator or Photoshop and comment the image… All that was repetitive and so annoying.

Now with Jing I only need a few seconds to send a screen capture with comments to a friend!

• Let’s go: download Jing here. You will discover a fascinating sun appearing right at the top of your desktop.

• Hide the sun. You don’t need to keep it (I hear you saying: “I don’t want this dirty thing on my clean desktop!”). And I agree, it is not very user-friendly…. When you have for instance a lot of tabs opened in Chrome, you can’t click on the one under the Jing thing!
  So click on the right button to configure Jing.  Check “hide the jing sun”, put a “hotkey” (ctrl+alt+w for example) and then go to “customize Jing buttons: here is the eldorado!

• Set up some integrations. Then I advise you to have a Flickr account where you’ll put all the images. If you don’t want that everybody can look your print screen, you can check a private checkbox when you are creating a button. If you are a geek, you should have a ftp server running, you can configure a button so that it sends the image in the FTP and create the right url (you give to it a pattern).

So if we sum up. Now, if you want to create a screen capture, you press “ctrl+alt+w” then you click on the zone you want to grab, add arrows, comments… and finally press the flickr button. Then you can make a “ctrl+v” everywhere you want to share the image: Twitter, mail, Skype… Pretty straight foward isn’t it?

There are not many tools I claim to use 3 or 4 times day, but Jing is definitely one of those.