Animated Gif Screencasts | Hacker News Reader

Animated Gif Screencasts

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8 pointspclark7 comments

The benefits you list are nice, but a video screencast has a couple of big advantages: (1) it sits still until you decide you want to play it. Animated gifs are distracting when you're trying to read the surrounding post, and the more such gifs you have the worse it gets. (2) you can rewind and replay the bits you don't understand.

Are these problems solvable? Could they be solved by this tool?

The first one seems solvable just by having a still shot with a play icon on it that swaps out for the gif when you click it. The second one seems hard.

i meant (but got distracted and subsequently didn't) to write a note on when NOT to use gifs. i don't think they're a killer to screencasts or anything.

I was kind of hoping you'd solve those problems so I could just use gifs. :)

It occurred to me once that some kind of JS animation might do, as well. But you'd need a "player" that would allow rewind. It would be too much work to build that for any particular blog post but quite handy to apply if someone else built it.

Does the structure of animated gifs allow for any control over how the thing is played back?

No, you should make the gifs so they're short enough steps they just repeat and aren't confusing. Make sense? I'm going to write another post on this in more detail I think.

So basically each gif covers one discrete step of whatever process you're documenting? That would work. I don't want a dozen animations all going at it at once on a page, though.

Another similar application that I use, GifCam[0], made by a redditor. GifCam also lets you modify the frames you recorded, add timing delays, save to different GIF formats (B&W, 256 color, etc.)

[0]: http://blog.bahraniapps.com/?page_id=21

This looks pretty sweet. I wonder if there's a similar application for linux desktops?

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