Here is the method I used to make the images for my Xamarin UIGravityBehavior recipe. That said, if you know a better way to do this, toss a comment out there I’d love to hear about it. While I use these methods for my Xamarin.iOS creations, they apply equally to native apps and most anything running on a Mac. While the name sounds slightly…off, it definitely gets the job done. LICEcap, from Cockos Incorporated, is a quick disk image install. In fact, here’s LICEcap’s capture of me installing LICEcap. One thing to notice, these GIFs are not a great way to capture complex color palettes like the gradients in the install image folder. There may be a tool that is better at that, but you will probably compromise file size for fidelity. With LICEcap, you capture an arbitrary portion of the screen, so you can capture just a portion of your app all the way to the full simulator with your Twitter feed rolling in the background around it. LICEcap loads as a transparent window, looking eerily as if something failed to render. Instead, what the program frames is what will be captured. You pull the various window edges and corners as needed to frame your target. It can be maddening to adjust it just right if you are shooting for specific pixels. You can also set exact pixel measurements with the two bottom inputs.Īfter you set your capture area, you can set a maximum frames per second (FPS) as well. For representative purposes, it seemed I needed fewer FPS than I thought. The resulting file size variation from FPS settings will depend heavily on your recording length and the complexity of the graphics. For some animations, file size can get substantial fairly quickly.įor my UIGravityBehavior recipe, practically ideal for GIF compression, it wasn’t a big difference from 5fps to 30fps. Unless you want a huge recording, you probably want to scale the Simulator to 50% with Command+ 3. For a full-app capture, you will end up getting the bottom rounded corners of the window unless you crop a few pixels. For most apps, trimming those pixels doesn’t seem to be a loss. At half scale, I find setting LICEcap to 318×564 then lining up with a top corner works quite well. Doing so highlights one frustration with the program. When capturing skinny views with exact dimensions, such as the iOS Simulator in portrait, you need to enter your height first or the field disappears before you can give it a value. Once you are all set, hit the record button. You will also have a few options here that may be of interest, such as showing a circle for mouse button presses or loop repeat count. When you are all set hit “Save” and you will get a 3-2-1 countdown in the title bar before recording begins. (You can also pause and resume during a recording.) Trimming the result After everything is complete, simply hit “Stop” to save the result. If you find you have a bunch of extra frames in your animation, open your GIF in Preview. From there you can selecting the offending frames and hit delete. But, once you edit in Preview, any infinite looping you had will be gone. I found Gifsicle, a command line utility, fixed this for me quite nicely. If you really just need a static screenshot, don’t forget the baked-in offerings. The easiest shots can be done in the iOS Simulator, a simple Command+ S (File: Save Screen Shot) will save a PNG result of your app to the desktop. Need to capture the Simulator among other windows? You capture the full screen with Command+ Shift+ 3 and can then crop to your desired size. To capture a partial screenshot, hit Command+ Shift+ 4 and draw what to capture with the crosshairs. These images are also saved to your desktop, time-stamped, but they are formatted “Screen Shot ”. Basic title frame, with or without text.Ĭlick on the screenshot below to see LICEcap in action.If you need a video to do your app justice, by all means, let me introduce you to this neat tool included on your Mac for free: QuickTime Player. Adjustable maximum recording framerate, to allow throttling CPU usage. Global hotkey (shift+space) to toggle pausing while recording Pause and restart recording, with optionally inserted text messages. Move the screen capture frame while recording. LCF files within REAPER (and/or use it to convert to. GIF, higher quality (more than 256 colors per frame), and more accurate timestamping. LCF file format, which allows for higher compression ratios than. GIF, LICEcap supports its own native lossless. This could prove useful for presentations at the office or for just having a bit of fun with friends making funny GIF animations. LICEcap is a fun and extremely easy to use little graphics application for making GIF animation directly from your desktop.
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