
Animated Gif Screencasts - pclark
https://www.userfox.com/blog/How-to-record-animated-gif-screencasts/
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gruseom
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.

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pclark
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.

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gruseom
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?

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pclark
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.

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gruseom
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.

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ToastyMallows
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](http://blog.bahraniapps.com/?page_id=21)

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

