Jing

» see techsmith.com/jing.html as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Showing somebody your screen here, around 2009, meant pressing the print screen key and pasting the result straight into an MSN window. That was the entire procedure and it was good enough for almost everything. Jing was built on a different assumption: that what you wanted was not an image in a conversation but a hosted page with an address, sent to a person who would open it later, probably at work, probably in a different building.

TechSmith released it in November 2007 after a summer beta, from the company that already sold Camtasia and SnagIt. It was free with no catch worth naming. Once installed it parked a small yellow sun on the edge of your monitor, and dragging it out gave you a crosshair for selecting part of the screen. You then chose a still or a video, and the video could run to five minutes.

Everything after the capture was the actual product. It uploaded to Screencast.com, TechSmith's own hosting, and dropped the link on your clipboard so the next thing you did was paste it. No account juggling at the moment of use, and no file sitting in a downloads folder waiting to be attached to something. For a support agent explaining a settings page, or a lecturer marking up a spreadsheet, that loop was faster than anything else available for free.

The five-minute cap was a design choice rather than a limitation of the engine, and it shaped what people made. You cannot ramble for five minutes. The format that Jing enforced, one problem shown once and handed over as a link, is the ancestor of every quick screen recording that gets pasted into a ticket today.

~ the record ~

~ the money ~

The free version wrote video as SWF, the Flash format, which was a reasonable decision in 2007 when every browser on earth had the plugin. Jing Pro arrived on 6 January 2009 at about fifteen dollars a year and existed mostly to fix that. It wrote MP4 and uploaded straight to YouTube, and the TechSmith badge on the end of your clip went away with it.

It did not last. TechSmith announced the retirement of Jing Pro in February 2012 and closed the service on 28 February 2013. The paid features went toward Camtasia instead. Jing itself carried on free, unchanged, still writing Flash files, for another seven years. That is the part worth noticing. The company kept a free product running long after it had given up on selling anything alongside it.

~ the last upload ~

Adobe announced in July 2017 that Flash would be finished at the end of 2020, and browsers began removing it well ahead of that date. Jing's whole output format was on a published schedule to stop working. TechSmith said as much in 2018 and promised a replacement. It spent the two years after that building TechSmith Capture, which does the same job and writes MP4.

Uploads from Jing to Screencast.com were switched off on 14 July 2020. The application still ran after that and would still capture a screen, but the link at the end of the loop, which was the reason anyone used it, no longer appeared. The last builds had been sitting unchanged since 2015 on both Windows and the Mac.

~ what got buried with it ~

Thirteen years of screencast.com links are scattered across support forums and course pages and internal wikis, and a large share of them point at SWF files that no browser will render. The pages are still up. The videos are technically still there. The plugin required to see them was deliberately removed from every browser on the planet, so the effect is the same as deletion with none of the honesty of it.

There is a small closing joke in it. TechSmith Capture, the free replacement built specifically to outlive Flash, has now itself been retired, with the company pointing users toward the paid products it was designed to be free alongside. The free tier is the part that goes first, twice in a row, for the same reason both times.

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