Show HN: Glitterly – Create and share videos of your app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Glitterly – Create and share videos of your app

glitterly.app

112 pointsoskarahl26 comments

Hi HN,

I’m a big fan of following feature updates for my favourite apps, and I’ve always wondered how they make videos that have all these nice transitions and zooms.

And so I wanted to create a product that a non-professional video editor / solo developer / bootstrapping tech founder can use to edit a screen recording of your app.

Features: - Add padding and set a frame from Unsplash - Gifs - Highlight user interactions with a zoom - Transitions and animations.

Use cases: feature demos, presentations, social media posts, “how to” videos.

Putting my MVP out here, and keen to hear your feedback.

Looks really nice for such use cases. Shared the same with my social media team to take it forward.

Hopefully you'll keep it affordable :)

Thanks! i'm happy to keep it free in exchange for feedback :) would love to hear their thoughts at oskar.ahlroth@gmail.com

Nice, I’m working on creating a demo video of a product we’re launching soon, will give this a shot!

very nice app and landing page!

this looks so good! care to share details about your stack and major technical challenges?

Looks really solid.

I built a similar product called Automagical awhile back (https://automagical.ai/) that we exited to a media agency.

A few notes from my experience:

1. Using gifs in this way as part of a composite video is unfortunately against giphy's ToS. We received a cease & desist from them after awhile, so just be aware of that up front.

2. If you want to support more variety in your transitions, check out my OSS project https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/ffmpeg-concat

Overall, the product looks really polished & I love where you're headed. Best of luck!

Thanks for the feedback, very impressive that you exited Automagical.

1. Haha oh no, I'll have to look for alternatives to Giphy then.

2. Yes i've been eyeing this for a while as the GL-transitions are really smooth, I plan to add it once I release further support for multiple screens.

> Using gifs in this way as part of a composite video is unfortunately against giphy's ToS

That seems silly, as I don’t think they own/have a license to any of their GIFs.

But they do have a license to their API which you are using to access those GIFs.

Hey oskarahl, as a solo dev working on https://ente.io, I was looking for something just like this!

The MVP imo is the ability to zoom.

What I'd kill for is the ability to add text widgets to point out/explain features.

Thanks for building this, and congratulations for launching. All the best!

Thanks! Yes sliding in texts / headers / annotations are on the upcoming features list. Any specific kind of text widgets that you are thinking of?

I was thinking of a widget where in I can set the font-style and related properties, along with the background color and padding.

Hi @oskarahl - I'll give it a go. Two questions:

1. How does video capture work - does it need local installation or does it do something clever through the browser?

2. How well suited is it to recapturing an updated version of a video, without redoing all the config again by hand?

On the second point, my common scenario is an app gets updated and there's a new button or slight change in a part of the screen (not the core feature being captured) and to keep it consistent, I need to re-record basically the same video with the latest app release. Got anything to help speed that up?

Thanks for checking it out.

1. Currently it's a web-based video editor (so no download required) where you edit screen recordings, so at the moment you'll need to record your screen and then upload it.

2. I see, maybe adding a "skeleton" loader overlay over content that's not affected by the core feature would handle this? e.g. something like this: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1275154148938461185

On point 2, yes that could work. Originally I'd been thinking of it remembering the same screen capture size/locations etc, so it would just reapply those to my updated capture but your way would help keep people focused and avoid distraction with surrounding UI.

I've been dragging my heels on doing a new demo video for my company - going to try this out first thing Monday. Thanks, @oskarahl!

Couple things I'll be looking into:

* the zooming looks awesome

* how easy it is to insert title cards or subtitles

* I don't think I need the borders, so it'd be good if those are optional.

That's awesome let me know how it goes. The border can be removed by pressing the "undo" button (perhaps the ui/ux for this could be a bit clearer - i'll see what I can do).

Currently no title/subtitle support yet (outside of the intro scene), but it's something i'll start working on asap as it's been requested by quite a few users already.

Hi @oskar, looks very nice! What's the pricing on this? Couldn't see anything on your site.

I know there may be a concern about putting pricing front-and-center in that would scare off potential users, but highly recommend having some pricing somewhere to test actual market viability. Many people want cool stuff, but refuse to pay for it - unfortunately, that indicates the product or service isn't solving a real pain point (and that that user base is actually lousy for a business). I don't think Glitterly falls in this category, but you need paying customers to have a business, and it's best to find out this information sooner rather than later. You can always raise or reduce prices, but having something there is the best way to start figuring this out.

Good luck! It's a long journey so congrats on taking the first step.

Thanks for the suggestion it's a good point of view that I hadn't considered yet.

Currently it's completely free and open to use for anyone, but I'll run out of free digital ocean server credits one day :)

Did you get a chance to try out the video editor itself, what do you think?

Nice job, this is exactly what I'll be using on my weekend project to show my other projects! (makers.page, a place for makers to show their projects, blog etc.)

Great, let me know how it goes :)

Are there an pre-set dimensions/settings for iPhone apps? What I'd really like is just easy exporting of all screenshots and the video thumbnail. I know there's a lot of tools that do this already but there's always room for new effects/styles. Thanks

Looks great, I used for a few minutes and it's very intuitive! I did try to download my video on Firefox and after waiting a few minutes I gave up, maybe you got an error in your tracker?

Thanks! The video transformations can be a bit time-consuming (especially right now as there is quite a bit of traffic from hackernews) - I'll add a proper loader so you can see how much time is remaining. Admittedly I haven't tested much with firefox, i'll check if there is an issue with the download itself.

This looks good. I use screen flow but can see the simplicity of this.

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