My Favorite GIF App Features: Giphy Capture (Mac OS X)
Screen captures, camera captures, standalone video files, and video URLs — these are the basic source materials that creators of animated GIFs must become familiar working with. With Giphy’s latest app, Giphy Capture, the company now offers easy and effective ways of handling material from all four sources.
My favorite features of Giphy Capture don’t have anything to do with how well it captures, but the UI choices that were made to illuminate the path towards a successful screen capture.
For example, the draggable corner is relatively sparse, except for the stripes that signify that the corner is draggable. But once dragging commences the app shows you the dimensions of your capture area before disappearing upon release. A fine example of progressive disclosure.
Once you have more than one capture completed during the session, the capture screen contains a drawer with thumbnails of previous captures listed below. Each of these thumbnails expands to allow further editing or deletion of the capture.
Another one of my favorite features of the app are the edit controls. You can trim the capture, change the playback mode, and adjust the overall size of the capture to three app-determined settings.
I especially appreciate the way the playhead indicator reinforces the loop playback mode chosen (Normal, Reverse, or Pingpong). Like Giphy’s other apps, these little details make all the difference.
Overall, the Giphy Capture app is not introducing anything functionally new to the world of animated GIF creation. Recordit, most notably, along with Instagiffer, and about a dozen other screen-session recording apps have provided this ability for years. But for active Giphy users (the captures can be uploaded directly to your Giphy account) looking for a pleasant, and beautifully-designed experience, I can’t think of a better screen-capture GIF creator than this.
