Animating a Step

Let's talk about one of the coolest features in HowdyGo - animated steps.

When you record a demo, we take HTML snapshots of a page as well as recordings of how the HTML has changed over time between steps. This means that after recording, you can choose if you'd like to playback how your app changed between steps as a HTML animation.

You can think of this as kind of like a video, but with a few great benefits:

1. There is no change in quality between a "static" step in your demo and an "animated" step, as they are not videos.
2. Dynamic personalizations and find & replacements will still work on animated steps.

Use-cases

Some situations where you might want to use this feature include:

• Your app incorporates live collaboration and you want to show multiple users performing actions side-by-side
• A text input is typed in during your demo and you'd like to add a dynamic feel to the step
• You want to demonstrate a "drag and drop" gesture on an element
• Live data "pops up" in your application like a notification and you'd like to show it taking place.

Here's a really short demonstration of this feature in action.

Walkthrough

It's easy to enable animated steps in your demo. Simply toggle on Animate inside a step's Step Playback Settings. You don't need to do anything special during recording to enable animated playback during the editing process as HowdyGo automatically captures every step as though it will be animated.

If you do want to have an animated step though, we recommend putting some thought into how you will capture it. HowdyGo automatically skips over long pauses, but it's recommended that you perform these actions concisely during recording to ensure the playback looks great.