I realize that everyone has their own ways of rating what makes programs useful to them and it is no different when it comes to something as simple as screen capture programs. Many will like SnagIt, others will like FastStone and for the most part I have tried just about all of them. The thing is that each and every one of the best known ones have their best use cases but for me they either did too much or I just didn’t like them.

Then I came across another little project from TechSmith, the same people behind SnagIt, called Jing, and I haven’t looked back since. Sure there are maybe a few little things I might like to have as features but as it is Jing brings plenty to the table for the price of $0.00.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Jing you will see the Jing Orb at the top of your screen. This is how you activate the screen capture, access your image history, and the program settings.

Now it’s one thing to be able to capture something on your screen and save it to your machine but Jing allows you to do some quick and dirty text editing and a few other image enhancements.

As a blogger I do a lot of screen captures and while big packages like SnagIt and FastStone might have a whole bunch of bells and whistles in the majority of cases they are more than I need. This is where Jing comes in and provides just the things I need and does it well.

In addition though to saving your screen captures to your machine you can also save them to a dedicated Screencast.com account that comes with Jing.

When you save an image (or video) to your Screencast account you are provided with a link to that image that you can then share with friends or co-workers.

Not happy with just that way of sharing Jing also pushed out an update today that adds the option to share your screen capture on Twitter.

The one additional feature of Jing that I haven’t used myself is its ability to create screen recording (in the Pro version you can also add a webcam shot) and save it both locally and to your Screen cast.com account.

So if you are looking for a screen capture program that is easy to use and free but with plenty of handy options then I’d heartedly recommend you give Jing a try.