ScreenToGif

Gif/Jif? However you want to pronounce it, gif files have made a strong resurgence in the past years, and they can be very funny. But gif can also be very serious. 

In my work on Umbraco pull requests, the very best thing you can do to help me is to show me how things work, preferably a before/after is very helpful.

Until a few years ago it was not possible to post videos to GitHub, but images (including animated gifs) would work, so at the time the best way to post a video would be as a gif. 

My colleague Kenn Jacobsen discovered a tool simply called ScreenToGif and it is awesome!

While ScreenToGif is "just" screen recording software, it is very simple, reliable, open source and free. 

Additionally, despite having "Gif" in it's name, it also produces nice mp4 files as an option. Since mp4 files are now supported in GitHub, this is the (MUCH!) preferred way of sharing a video with us. The additional benefit of producing an mp4 video is that we can easily pause, rewind, fast forward, etc. If you post just a gif we might need to watch it in full a few times to be able to figure out what's going on, often I really do blink and miss it 😅

While ScreenToGif is a simple app, there are some very powerful ways of editing the video as well, including introducing annotations like text, drawings and images.

If your GitHub issues and pull requests contain a good video showing off any problems that are hard to explain in words then you are definitely going to be super appreciated by the team reviewing your issue, so make sure you always have ScreenToGif handy! Thanks and #h5yr!