Jing

If you’re interested in a free and handy screencast app, you should take a look at Jing. It enables you easily to frame a screenshot and take it either as a still or as video — with sound, too, if your machine is equipped for it. It works on both Windows and Mac (and is something of a godsend for the latter, because there was no good cheap tool for making screencast videos for the Mac). Jing — it styles itself as a project — hopes you’ll find it handy for folding videos or stills into IM, email or blogs: your vids and pics are stored on their server at Screencast, and you’re given a URL for each of your products, which you can then send to your correspondent or your blog. You can embed the objects, too, thanks to a functionality that Screencast gives you, as explained in this video. Handy for producing quick online tutorials and graphic explanations.