Recently I came across one of the sweetest online tools for screen capture and screen video casting – it’s called Jing. This amazing little utility, built by TechSmith, makes it easy to capture the screen image, but the video screen recording is what I really keyed in on as a product manager. Often as a product manager we need to explain to our developers a random bug that occurs on the software or website, but when they go on to replicate it they don’t get the error so the developer will shrug and say “sorry, try to figure out how to replicate it and then let us know” – argh! Now with Jing and its connection with screencast.com, I can easily capture video and audio of anything that is on my screen. So I capture the bug or screen that I want and send a link to the developer and they are able to see what happens and from there they are generally able to fix the problem. Granted there are commercial, more robust screen video capturing software such as Camtasia, but this way my whole team (product managers, content writers, even customer service support) are able to capture the video and provide a link to easily show the dev team what is happening.

The whole video capture with Jing is awesome, but then the other day I started to play with the image capture piece in conjunction with Flickr – wow! I love using this feature! Now I can capture an image, edit the name, and share it on Flickr. Now with Flickr I am able to use the Flickr editing and notation features (Picknik) to indicate aspects of the image. I am using this for both bug issues as well as for doing research on the site.

Cruising the Internet this evening I came across Rsizr.com, a really cool image re-sizer.   It uses a method called “retarget” where certain brush strokes are removed when shrinking the image and when enlarging it the brush strokes are added.  I can see a lot of potential for this site and the software behind it.  All-in-all, Rsizr.com is pretty cool.

Here is a screenshot of Rzisr reading the brush strokes with the retarget mode: