Is there a screen recording app that saves as .gif?

Question

I have a blog, and sometimes I'd like to show my readers something specific about computers.

I've seen a lot of screen recording software, but all seem to save as video files.

Do any save as an animated GIF? I know how to transform a small video into a .gif, but I believe that I could make a smaller file if the .gif was created directly.

I'd like to be able to make something like this (from Codinghorror's "Invisible Formatting Tags are Evil"):

Answer 1

Camtasia. If you scroll down, in the comments Jeff says:

Please, tell what tool you did use to make that kind of gif-based animated demo ?

In this case, it's Camtasia, but I've used gif-gif-gif before for similar effects. Check out the Donation Coder roundup of screencasting tools for more options:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/ScreenCasting/

Jeff Atwood on May 9, 2006 9:02 AM

Answer 2

When I have done this in the past, I always would do it in a two stage process. The easiest way to do this is use an application that records the video you want to convert into a GIF and then the second part of the process is to convert the video into a GIF image.

There are good desktop/screen capture utils however I recommend either Capture Fox or Screen Toaster.

Animake will convert an mpg video into a GIF file.