Techsmith, making of Camtasia Studio and SnagIt, have recently announced a new program in the world of Screen Capture and Recording. They Call it Jing.

In essence, Jing is a lightweight program, combining many of the useful features of both Camtasia and SnagIt, with the ability to easily share your captures with your friends and colleagues.

Jing allows you to quickly capture both images and video from your desktop, using a simple 'sunshine' icon docked on your desktop.

This however, is where the similarities between Camtasia and SnagIt, and Jing end. Instead of moving into an editing stage like their previous applications, Techsmith then allow you to upload your captures directly to an account at Screencast.com, and copy the URL directly to your clipboard. You can then use Instant Messaging programs to quickly and easily share your captures with your friends and colleagues.

In terms of video, your capture is rendered directly as an Flash SWF file, which means it can be done on the fly while you're still recording. This means the whole process of capture, upload and sharing can be done almost instantaneously, and you can have videos and images to share in less than a minute.

In the coming weeks we'll have a series of screencasts showing you how to use and get the most out of Jing, but in the meantime, you can download a free copy here - Jing Project.