Jing Listed on PC World’s Top 100 Products!
This morning, everyone on the Jing team was informed that it made PC World’s top 100 product list for 2008. Needless to say, we’re all excited! When we launched about a year ago, we felt that we were onto something by making it simple (and hopefully fun) to take and share screenshots and videos. Although we placed last on the list, it’s still a great feeling to know that there are people out there who feel the same way we do about this little program.
I know this sounds like an advertisement for Microsoft, but I truly feel that WPF enabled us to make Jing possible. Of course, programmatically taking screenshots is a simple bit-blit with some GDI function calls, but what I’m talking about is the overall user experience. From the sun splash screen that moves and animates to Jing’s docked position, to how the sun launcher reacts to the user’s mouse movement, it was WPF that allowed the team to try and create a program that would be not only useful, but fun. Not only that, but because WPF was built on top of .NET’s extensive APIs, it allowed us to be iterative, adapt to changing requirements, and encouraged us to be experimental with our UI designs. In other words, it let us be agile. Although we’ve stretched WPF’s capabilities, and there are some APIs that really should have a WPF equivalent (Screens *cough*cough*), I tremble thinking of how much more difficult development would be had we stuck with “good ol’” MFC/Win32.
Sun Launcher, made possible by WPF
Here’s hoping Microsoft keeps promoting and improving WPF, and that we’ll continue to take advantage of it here on the Jing team 
January 7, 2009 at 9:23 am
[...] pretty sure that it is. I got an instant WPF vibe from it (maybe the text?) and dug up this post which would seem to confirm my [...]