Lovin’ that Google Calendar

If you haven’t already, check out the Google Calendar. I use it every day within my organization for scheduling, but it is also very useful for quick public calendars such as this local Farmers’ Market Summer 2009 schedule.

The calendar below was, created, posted and published in less than an hour. It can easily be imported into your iCalendar compliant calendar software. It’s easily shared with viewers and designated editors.

Google Calendar is FREEEEEE … but requires you to have a Google Account (which is also freeeee, and will take you only a minute or two to create).

Questions?

If you have questions about an event, please contact the individual referenced in the event notes.

If you are the person responsible for updating event data, and would like editing access to this calendar, please contact me directly.

• Information sourced from the State of Maine web site.

Jing is my newest favorite software utility to fall under the category of “free software that I’d gladly pay for”. As described on the Jing Project web site

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video … from your computer to anywhere.

It’s one of those products that take a little while to fully appreciate, but soon I found myself screen grabbing several times a day for things I normally wouldn’t have bothered – for instance transaction payment confirmations, design elements, and bug tracking – anything that I thought I might want to view or visualize at some future date.

Jing Screen Shot

Saving the above screen shot to Flickr with the URL in my clipboard took four clicks, and literally less than five seconds.

Here are a few more cool features

• Available for PC or Mac
• Download and install in less than two minutes
• Always available
• Quickly capture screen images or video
• Quickly save captures to a local folder, or posts via FTP, or Flickr!
• Edit or annotate images prior to saving/posting
• Did I mention that Jing is free?

Jing is a product of TechSmith who may sound familiar as the creator of Camtasia – a popular commercial screen video capture software. They also have a product called SNAGIT used for quick and easy screen captures … Hey wait a minute. Did I just say they’re giving away their commercial product? Well, not exactly. No doubt SNAGIT has many capabilities that Jing does not – but in looking at the demo video, I didn’t see anything compelling enough to switch over.

The video capture is also an excellent, low-frills tool. I use it to make quick instructional videos for clients – things like how to install or use a piece of software. The output is a Flash SWF file which is highly compressed, and easy to transfer. The glaring omission is any form of editing.

If you need the frills, look to Jing’s commercial cousin, Camtasia. Camtasia is really the gold standard of screencasting, and is well worth the price for any serious webmaster. Jing is the free on-ramp product that will make you a daily user of Techsmith, and will likely convert many users to commercial customers.