Pictogram and Jing

This was my first attempt at using a piece of software called Jing to record a mini-tutorial. The software worked pretty well and was quite painless. There's not many features, it records an area you choose and you can have a microphone on or off. That's it. But it's simple enough for me. it gives you a free video hosting account with Screencast to host the video on, or you can choose to save it and host it yourself.

It also takes screenshots, and the pics in the Art Attack post below were taken and automatically uploaded to Flickr using Jing.

Anyway, the best way of getting a feel for a piece of software is to use it in anger so I've made a tutorial that shows how you can very simply set up Smart Notebook to create a pictogram using the Infinite Cloner tool. I love using the Infinite Cloner for things like arrows to label diagrams and suchlike. Every time you click on an item it will be copied over and over again. it's great to do with images of coins for shopping tasks - drag out the coins to pay for an item that costs £1.63 or whatever.

One issue with Jing is that it seems to render the video actual size. So capturing a 800x800 area still produces a 800x800 video with no options (that I can see) to scale it down. Obviously putting that size video in my blog would totally bork the layout. So I'll just link to the video for now. I don't know if I am missing an option somewhere, so I'll have a play.

Until then click here to view the video.