One of these days, I needed a tool to record gifs from iOS devices to provide a better description to our PRs here at Work&Co. It wasn’t uncommon for us to open PRs with no description at all or with minimum overview of what was being accomplished.
Let me tell you something: design matters at this company! It’s hard to create amazing digital products and even harder to assess its code. We decided we could do better with our PRs.
Recording gifs from iOS devices has never been easy. You can find a bunch of tools online that are paid or simply don’t work. The alternative was to launch QuickTime, record a video and convert it to gif. That’s a lot of work. It’s tiresome and time consuming. We we could do better!
We did better
It turns out that, right now, it’s awfully simple to record a gif from your iOS simulator. All you need to do is run one simple command:
$ ios-simulator-gif yolo.gif
This will immediately start recording the gif and stop when you press any key. The gif will be saved
to the yolo.gif. Need to customize the gif? No problem at all! These are the arguments accepted
by ios-simulator-gif:
| Options | Description | Default value |
|---|---|---|
| -r, –rate | Framerate of the output | 6 |
| -f, –format | Output format | gif |
| -vf, –video-filter | Video filter for ffmpeg |
scale=320:-1 |
| -h, –help | Outputs helper message | N/A |
Need more?? We got you covered fam! Anything you pass after -- will be sent directly as args to ffmpeg!
$ ios-simulator-gif -r 30 example.gif -- -b 128k
You’re welcome!
Installation
Assuming that you have Homebrew installed, execute the following steps:
- Use the repository as a “tap” (alternative package repository):
$ brew tap fjcaetano/ios-simulator-gif https://github.com/fjcaetano/ios-simulator-gif.git
- Install ios-simulator-gif (and dependencies):
$ brew install fjcaetano/ios-simulator-gif/ios-simulator-gif
If you want to install it directly, that’s on you. If you can’t figure that out, and don’t know what you’re doing, just install Homebrew and be happy.