I'm thinking of creating another guide, but it will be helpful if I can illustrate some actions with an animation. Is there a tool that'll let you capture the actions on your screen, crop it to the area of interest, and save it as a GIF file?

i think "byzanz" might be want you want. on my suse box it was an easy 'smart install byzanz'. works pretty well.

then the command to run it is 'byzanz-record heathenx.gif'

man page: http://linux.die.net/man/1/byzanz-record

Should have known I'd get a Linux answer I intend to run Linux in a VM but I'm limited to 1GB/month downloads at my current residence and don't have ISO's handy.

Does anybody know of a Windows solution until then?

ha! see what happens when i assume things?

hmm...i know of several gif recorders but i don't know of any that are free. i have seen some go as high $50. dang it! byzanz would have been perfect.

What I did... record with CamStudio and the lossless CamStudio codec. Then crop in Virtualdub, save as AVI (again with the lossless CamStudio codec). Then dump the frames with ffmpeg (or mencoder if you like) and finally import the folder in Photoshop or whatever and export as GIF.

You could have skipped the save as avi and ffmpeg steps. Virtual Dub can directly export image sequences (under the File menu).

Of course, you'd still need to compile the stills into a GIF, preferably an optimized one. (GIMP works great for that).

-Rob A>

Thanks guys. This sounds like a very practical solution. Manually assembling the GIF frames won't be a problem. The new beta version of CamStudio looks to introduce some really neat feature like visual feedback of a mouse click - it would be neat if they can do that with the keyboard as well.

ffaat wrote:You could have skipped the save as avi and ffmpeg steps. Virtual Dub can directly export image sequences (under the File menu).[...]

Oh that works indeed.

microUgly wrote:...it would be neat if they can do that with the keyboard as well.

For windows, an option is osdHotKey http://www.romeosa.com/osdHotkey/help.html

It will display the keypresses used including shift, control, alt and windows keys, including chords and combinations in an on screen window. It also shows the button clicked on the mouse or scroll wheel moves. Also cursor keys.

The only thing it doesn't do is fade/blank out the last key(s) pressed after a time.

I looked really hard, and this was the only software I could find for windows to do this. Hope it helps.

-Rob A>