JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

by Urs Hunkler -
Number of replies: 10
Picture of Core developers

Techsmith, the company behind camtasia, has started the JING Project for OS X and Windows.

We may have a great visual tool for issue documentation in the Moodle tracker with annotated images or screen videos.

You may watch me writing the previous sentence when you click on "Urs writes a sentence".

The Video Tour on their website shows how JING is used. It's easy to install and and free service for now. Visual communication and enhanced issue reports in our Moodle tracker on your finger tips.

I am really curious if anybody will use this visual documentation option or if screenshots in the tracker are the better way? We will see ...

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In reply to Urs Hunkler

Re: JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

by ned moltoya -
I didn't know there was someone out there who types even more slowly than I do wink
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In reply to Urs Hunkler

Re: JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

by John Isner -
Urs,
I installed Jing and I will start using it. However I am concerned about the following:

Jing files are hosted on Screencast.com. To use Jing, you'll need to sign up for a Screencast.com account. This will provide you with 200 MB of storage and 1GB per month of bandwidth. The normal trial account for Screencast.com has a 60 day limit, but to get the most out of the Jing Project, and to share our appreciation for your feedback, we're offering a trial account with no expiration until the end of the Jing Project (date to be determined).

Here's the Screencast.com pricing scheme (captured with Jing):

Notice that I made you click a link to see the image. Ideally, I should have used the Insert image tool on the editor toolbar to show the image inline, but here's what happens when I do that and enter the link URL:

Jing image

(you only see my alternate text).

The URL is: http://www.screencast.com/t/_BRNGr4tZ

I think it is because Moodle only recongizes JPG, GIF and PNG as image files.

Can you suggest a workaround?


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In reply to John Isner

Re: JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

by Ray Lawrence -
Hi John,

I just linked to the image without a problem - it's a png ()

I pasted the link into the image url field.
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In reply to Ray Lawrence

Re: JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

by John Isner -
Ray,
I pasted the URL that Jing put on the clipboard, which was the short URL in my post above. How did you get yours?

I know of only one way to get the embeddable URL (the one with the png extension): after making the capture and saving it to the Web, login to screencast.com, go into your folder of images, locate the image, and copy the embedded URL which is displayed there. That's too much work! It defeats the purpose of Jing, which is to make capturing and sharing images easy. Is that how you got your URL? If not, how did you get it?
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In reply to John Isner

Re: JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

by Ray Lawrence -
Hi,

In firefox:

Right click the image
Select copy image location
Paste

That's it.....
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In reply to Ray Lawrence

Re: JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

by John Isner -
Ray,
I still don't get it. How is it that are you viewing the image in Firefox? Would you mind backing up all the way to the beginning and explaining how (step-by-step) you capture an image using Jing and embed that image in a forum post?

I was able to find a quicker way than the one I described. After you capture and save to the Web, Jing gives you a popup letting you know that it has put the (non-embeddable) URL on the clipboard. That popup also contains a link to a page on screencast.com where you can manage the image (e.g., rename, delete). That page displays a link to the embeddable URL. You can right click and copy link location from there. It's one extra step, but it's acceptable.

Here's a screenshot of Ray that I captured this way. image.png?parameters=9f39525b-6f9d-4035-beee-7d86937df739_836e2f87-e0bd-41da-bcc5-0adc5fec51b1_static_0_0_image.png&downloadOnly=true
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In reply to John Isner

Re: JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

by Ray Lawrence -
Hi,

I've been responding between (and during) phone calls so I may have missed a bit...

Ok, here goes.

If I understand what you're trying to achieve it's to link to an image in the Jing site so that it is displayed in a moodle activity or resource e.g. a forum post. The image file that you want to link to is a .png. (I'll set aside the issue about linking to images on the sites of others here as it appears that this is accepted in this instance).

If I view the web page in FF I can right click on an image and then select "Copy image location" to get the URL of that image e.g.

To display that image in my, say, forum post I do the following.

Click the insert image icon in the HTML editor toolbar, paste the image url into the "Image URL" field, add some text to the "Alternate text" field, click "OK" and then post to forum and ....that's it. See below.... smile
John's profile pic

Edit: Just had a look at the url for the image above... eek.
http://content.screencast.com/file/image.png?parameters=9f39525b-6f9d-4035-beee-7d86937df739_836e2f87-e0bd-41da-bcc5-0adc5fec51b1_static_0_0_image.png&downloadOnly=true
... and no alternate text.

Compared to:

Yes, it's me again.....



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In reply to Ray Lawrence

Re: JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

by John Isner -
Ray,
I think I understand the confusion. This discussion started with Urs Hunkler's post about screen capture with Jing. My posts were all follow-ups to his post, not general questions about how to embed an image in a forum post. I know how to do thatsmile

The problem with Jing is a "chicken and egg" problem. When you capture the image using Jing, Jing puts a URL on your clipboard. But the URL on the clipboard links to a page on screencast.com where your image is displayed, not the image per se. So you must visit the screencast.com site to get the image URL. This takes two or three extra steps. This makes Jing less attractive when your goal is to embed Jing images on Web pages.

To Urs and anyone else interested in Jing: I posted a streamlined method of getting the embeddable URL in the Tips and Tricks forum.
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In reply to John Isner

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In reply to Deleted user

Re: JING may be a great tool to help visual communication and to illustrate issues in the Moodle tracker

by John Isner -
Dietmar,
Yes, I know. I am trying to solve the original problem: How to embed a Jing image in a moodle.org forum post, like this Picture of Dietmar. For that, I need to store it on the Web, and I need the embeddable URL, which is only available by visiting screencast.com.
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