WhazzerFinger

Have you ever tried to record a movie from the iOS Simulator for marketing purposes ? I did !

I first tested existing applications, but didn’t find what I was looking for.

The best I came up with was using SimFinger + the native QuickTime screen capture: not that bad, but not satisfying enough…

Here are some things that really annoyed me with this setup:

• The ‘setup’ time for every capture is quite long: you have to prepare the simulator, then launch SimFinger and finally select the capture area in QuickTime.
• Movies captured with this setup are not ‘iMovie ready’. What I mean: the aspect ratio is not compliant with standard ones, so it is necessary to crop the frame.. And then you see big nasty pixels..

So I decided to write my own application. As I did it to promote my Whazzer project, I named it WhazzerFinger.

The application runs on OS X 10.6 and 10.7 and has the following features:

• Supports iPhone simulator in portrait and landscape mode.
• Video frames are captured to RAM, so that no frames are dropped. To capture longer videos: make sure to close all unnecessary applications before starting.
• FPS is 16 (which I found is a good compromise between quality / memory).
• Video are encoded in H.264 format, ready for iMovie import.
• The application also takes screenshot images.

If you are interested in using it, then grab the sources (XCode project) on GitHub, right here, and build it.

For the laziest ones, here is the binary (packaged as .dmg): WhazzerFinger 0.1.

The current version is not perfect yet, but I’ll try to improve it later.

Originally published at https://blog.grousset.fr on March 26, 2012.