Jing is an easy-to-use screen capture application for both Windows and Mac. It can capture both images and video. Even better, it is as easy to copy the image as it is to save it to your hard drive or email it or blog it.

Jing can sit silently in your taskbar, or it can be an active icon at the top, bottom, or side of your computer screen. Click on that icon, and you can have your screen capture in seconds. If you are having an online conversation, pictures can be worth a thousand words.

One of the surprising aspects to this software is that the basic version is free. The paid Pro version includes greater video support, including recording from a webcam and instant posting to YouTube and Facebook. Once I started using it, I can’t do without it. It is that good.