This morning kicked off the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, California. Thousands of developers and press waited in line for the highly anticipated keynote by Phil Schiller.

Twitter was being flooded by attendees giving minute by minute updates using the hash tag #WWDC. At 12pm CST today, there were 78 new tweets per second with the WWDC hash tag attached. There was a lot of momentum and energy surrounding this morning's event -- people were predicting what was going to be announced, a new iPhone or OS, and rumors started to spread that someone saw Steve Jobs in the building, spawning the prediction that Jobs would make an appearance. When it came down to it, everyone just wanted to hear it from the man himself.

I was somewhat to disappointed to go on SnagIt's download page and find out the application was not supported for Mac OS X. However, I didn't have to go far to find Jing, created by the same company that brought you SnagIt, Techsmith.

And even better, Jing is free.

Techsmith launched Jing as a project back in July 2007, and it's no secret they might come out with a premium version. Currently, Jing uses screencast.com to host files and provides the user with 2GB of storage and 2GB of transfer sound. After capturing an image or video, the user can:

1) add text, arrows, or highlighted selected areas
2) instantly grab html code and imbed the image or video to their site
3) upload the file to screencast.com, flickr, ftp, or the user hard drive

Jing doesn't offer the same user functionality as SnagIt, and they explain this reason in the QA section on their website:

"...the key difference is about workflow. Jing is designed to be fast-visual communication shared with others in a variety of locations. Capture. Annotate. Share."