For a lot of users creating screencasts is too much of a pain, and so a lot of people will avoid them. This is especially true if they see software like Camtasia Studio that has a pricetag of $300, which is overkill for what most people are looking to do.

It's hard to believe that it has already been one year since TechSmith released their free Jing screencast and screenshot software. The project has been amazingly successful, and I can't say that I'm really surprised by that. Jing is simple to use, free, and more often than not it offers everything people need... including free hosting!

TechSmith has decided to offer both of their award-winning applications as free downloads! The first application is SnagIt, which is used to capture and create screenshots on your computer. The only catch is that they will give you a free license only for SnagIt 7.2.5, whereas the current version is SnagIt 8.2. One of the big drawbacks is that this version will not work properly in Windows Vista.

I hang out over in the Donation Coder forum from time to time because there are a lot of people over there who have discovered some extremely useful apps. One example of this just happened a few weeks ago when Nighted, a member of the forum, pointed out a great freeware utility called ThumbWin (Google Translation to English).

It's not often that I come across a Firefox extension that does so much that it actually warrants its own CyberNotes article, but Tab Kit is one of those extensions. The only thing is that the extension is so new that it's still in the Mozilla Sandbox, and therefore requires an extra step or two to actually get it installed.

You may remember an application called Yod'm that we wrote about back in March. It brought the famous 3D Linux virtual desktop manager over to the Windows side, but it was pretty rough around the edges.

CamStudio is one of the best free screencast recorders available, and it just got a little bit better. The developer recently released CamStudio 2.5 Beta 1 and it includes several new features that users are surely going to love. I think my favorite things are being able to select a specific window to record and highlighting the mouse clicks:

TechSmith is undoubtedly known for their screencast and screenshot software, dubbed Camtasia Studio and SnagIt. They’ve now started a free project called Jing that provides an alternative for making a screencast or taking screenshots.

Screencasts are a tool that I’ve been trying use more on the site because they explain things in actions rather than just words. I’ve gone over free software that will let you create screencasts, but many of them are more advanced than what you’d need.

SpaceTime has released a new 3D browser that is definitely innovative, but I don’t see it being all that useful. It boasts the 3D search, 3D eBay searching, and 3D tabbed browsing which is something your friends would definitely be impressed with, but that doesn’t mean it is very usable.