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Comment by joshdance | Hacker News Reader

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joshdance·

I love timelapses of things that were made. Wish all creation tools natively supported creating them.

Timelapse of a Sketch doc.

Timelapse of a code repo.

Timelapse of a painting.

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It's basically a similar problem to Github's arbitrary filetype web preview notion. If you can preview the repo state visually, you can animate it over time. The issue is that n-dimensional datasets (including PCB traces) do not have a standard 2D visualisation, which requires tradeoffs, which means one size does not fit all, which means hassle factor works against mass uptake.

I wonder how hard a tool to do this could be. Probably not too hard, as long as the window is maximized, you can specify the coordinates beforehand and just leave the screenshot program to do its thing.

The only wrinkle would be that taking screenshots based on intervals isn't as interesting as taking screenshots based on activity, but that doesn't seem insurmountable.

It depends on whether you want to show the particular thing being designed (like in this post) or to show the entire process. There is an esthetics issue with showing the whole thing: all of the small undo/redo steps and panning around makes for a jittery experience. Occasionally that looks good, but it is less easy to pull off.

Hm yeah, agreed. I wonder if there's still a way to automate this, like taking a snapshot after every undo.

Perhaps not a timelapse in the traditional sense, but Gource (https://gource.io/) is a fun way to watch a Git repo evolve.

Timelapse of 3D printing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJUlzVLmhSk

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