Jing: Capture screen actions as videos

Every few weeks, at the end of our Agile Sprint, we prepare demos for the work that was done as part of the sprint. Sometimes we do live demos and sometimes to save time, we just capture those demos and replay them at the sprint end meetings.

For capturing the screen actions into videos, I have found Jing to be an amazing software. The user experience is as simple as it can be. You open up Jing in "Capture" mode, then select the screen real estate you want to capture and say "Capture Video". At the end, you "Stop" and "Save". By default, it allows you to save videos in Flash format (.swf files) that can be played in any Flash compatible browser.

You can also do screenshots in Jing but I have found the Snipping Tool, that comes default with Windows Vista and later versions of Windows, to be more valuable.

Jing is available as freemium download for Windows and Mac.

Calibre: Reading PDF docs on your Kindle

If you have read pdf docs on your Amazon Kindle, you know how painful it is. On the other hand, reading Kindle eBooks is a heavenly experience. The reason for this mismatch is that Kindle eBooks come in a format called mobi and the pdf viewer on Kindle doesn't boast of user experience as its design goal.

Enter Calibre, a free and open source e-book library management application that provides eBook conversions, amongst its other features. You can open a pdf doc in Calibre and convert it to mobi. Calibre also provides a way to sync the converted .mobi file to your Kindle (through email). Additionally, you can always transfer the .mobi file through USB to your Kindle.