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Comment by juandazapata | Hacker News Reader

Or just use the free tool LICECAP (http://www.cockos.com/licecap/), record directly from the screen, export to GIF and avoid all that hassle.

However, I can see why this could be a cool learning experiment.

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If you can get beyond the ancient website design, this is actually an amazingly simple tool. It is trivial to record a small portion of your screen, and it saves directly to your desktop as a gif. No file saving, exporting, etc. At Engine Yard, we use these gifs for UI related pull requests, bug requests, etc. A picture is worth a thousand words, or something like that.

I use LICEcap a lot too, it's really cool. The only downside is the file sizes can quickly become gigantic compared to MP4. I wonder if imgur's new conversion feature could be useful here though if they're uploaded there..

That's not because of LICEcap, that's because of the nature of gifs. Gifs are a horrible format for longform motion. All Imgur or gyfcat do is convert it from a gif to a mp4.

If you're worried about size, just use the mp4.

Yeah, LICECAP is great. I have taken to using it for providing UI/UX feedback on Design. Just make the GIF, drag into github discussion for the issue or Pull Request. Done. :) It removes a lot of hassle of reproducing the errors for designers from verbal or written instructions. Keycastr is also a good addition to the set of tools, as it can show the exact commands you were entering too.

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