Show HN: μGiffer

by apankrat • 5 years ago

7 3 5 years ago

apankrat2• 5 years ago

As a part of my work, I do UI/UX design for our products and post some snippets of the process to the development blog. Being able to show things _in action_ is a must, but I couldn't find a tool that was convenient for doing multiple back to back screen captures of the same sequence. Record, review, tweak this, change that, record again, review, rinse and repeat. Captures are short, so they must be perfect, so it usually takes a dozen of tries to get them right.

So I made a tool for the job. It is tailored to this specific workflow, but I think it's generic enough to be useful in other cases too.

I thought it'd be complicated, but it turned out to be dead simple - get the device context of the desktop, bitblt it on timer to a bitmap, draw the mouse cursor, see if it changed from the last time, save to the disk. Once the capture is done, go through the images and pack them into a GIF. The rest is just some UI work, to make things convenient, but out of the way at the same time.

For the reference, GifCam [1] was close, but it has palette encoding issues that create visible artifacts in the output. ScreenToGif [2] is a .Net app, asked to install 4.8, that asked to reboot the computer, etc. It also comes with a lot of extra stuff (it has a ribbon-style menu bar!) and requires quite a bit of clicking to get things done. Others were even worse off in comparison. So, as per usual, you want things to be done your way, you do it yourself.

[1] http://blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam

[2] https://www.screentogif.com

jmiskovic• 5 years ago

So far I used LiceCap, but I like uGiffer more because it does its thing with less mouse clicking more keyboard shortcuts. It works well on Linux with Wine. Great job.

apankrat2• 5 years ago

Cheers, thanks.

I completely forgot about LiceCap! Notable option of a very good provenance. Still a bit too much UI for my taste :)

Show HN: μGiffer

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