Have you ever been chatting on a website forum and been totally unable to describe an action you’ve performed on Ubuntu? “Click the top bar—the grey thing at the top, you know. And then drag the icon. The blue icon. Drag it to the desktop…”
The fact is that it can be hard describing in words what are simple procedures with a mouse. A solution is at hand, however.
The Byzanz application lets you record your desktop, a window, or a defined area of the screen as a movie. The resulting file is an animated .gif, so is viewable in almost any web browser ever made. You could attach it to a forum posting if you’re asking for help, for example. The only downside is that the resulting movie file can be large, depending on the area you’ve defined and the length of the movie. Full desktop recordings can easily run in at double-digit megabytes, in fact.
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