Iris Beta Blog

Beta 13 was sent out to testers today. With some luck it will be the last beta build and we can send out a GM build soon and shortly after that submit it to the Mac App Store.

It’s been a long road. As usual, the the last 10% takes 90% of the effort. Hopefully we’re 99.9% complete and only the final touches remain.

We set out to create a new high performance screen recorder with a UI that makes sense. I think we’ve accomplished that. Here are some highlights of what sets Iris apart.

– Simple UI.
– Records directly to h.264.
– Can record your Mac’s audio, even targeting specific applications.
– The best color management available.
– Time lapse recording.
– Timers for starting/stopping a recording.
– Presets for saving/loading commonly used settings.
– Powerful auto-naming and Finder tagging.

Purchasing Iris

Early on we made the decision that Iris should be useful even without purchasing it. Our goal was to design a product that you’ll purchase because you want to, not because you have to. With that in mind we designed a tasteful watermark that is placed on recordings and a nice outro.

We plan on offering Iris exclusively through the Mac App Store. Iris will be free to try. An in app purchase will remove the watermark and outro from new recordings.

Before In App Purchase

After In App Purchase

Even though we’re nearing the end of Iris 1.0 development we still appreciate any feedback. Also, you can still join the Iris beta at MacDeveveloper.net for early access to Iris.

The Iris beta has been in full swing for about 2.5 months now. The core of the program has firmed up a lot, stability and performance are up, and many enhancements have been implemented to make Iris not only powerful, but a joy to use.

Changes since last progress update.

• Recordings to native Iris format now use delta frames to save on disk space
• Encoding and decoding native format are now massively parallel to take advantage of more CPU cores
• Decoding native format is now 25% faster
• Cursor can now be enabled/disabled during recording
• Mute button can now optionally function like a cough button
• Talking head now has additional appearance options: border thickness, border color, corner radius
• Can now record and export to h.264, Apple ProRes and JPEG
• Audio can now be recorded as mixed, discrete channels, or separate tracks
• Added window and freeform selection
• Added settings presets
• Other bug fixes and improvements

Notably, the Iris recording UI was overhauled. It looks nicer and the item grouping makes more sense.

We’re looking forward to releasing Iris. There a few things to wrap up before we can ship it.

You can still participate in the Iris beta at MacDeveloper.net

Please sign up if you want early access to Iris and a chance to give us feedback.

Many screen recorders have come and gone over the years and there has been one thing that has united them all.

Poor color matching.

Iris is here to end this sad state of affairs. Iris’ video processing pipeline ensures a high degree of color fidelity from end to end resulting in recordings that are as faithful as possible to the original material.

Color Matching Done Right

Color Bar

The Result

Shown here is the *worst* color match we were able to find in this sample.

Color Bar Sample

Iris Recording Sample

Everybody Else

Below you’ll find color samples taken from 2 popular screen recorders on the market. Note the extra green and lack of red in both of them.

Competitor 1 Sample

Competitor 2 Sample

Beta

We are striving to make Iris the best screen recorder possible. Iris is currently in beta at MacDeveloper.net Please sign up if you want early access to Iris and a chance to give us feedback.

Throughout development we are continuing to refine both the feature set and the UI of Iris. We already had the ability to stop a recording on a timer, but for some reason overlooked being able to start recording on a timer.

This gave us a chance to reevaluate the UI layout. We moved all of the timed recording UI, both starting and stopping, into a separate area. This way the UI stays out of the way until it is needed.

To access timed recording just click on the clock in the record button, set the times or durations, and click record.

We also added a way for users to type in the capture size and location. This is great when you know exactly how big of an area that you want to capture.

We just sent out the 4th beta to testers. If you are interested in beta testing Iris please sign up at MacDeveloper.net.

2 updates ago we discussed Iris’ Automatic Naming. I thought I was done with Saving preferences when I suddenly realized that I had overlooked something. It was staring me right in the eyes. Finder Tags!

So, without further ado Finder Tags in Iris.

Just type in the Finder Tags that you want attached to your recordings and that’s it. Now you have a great way to find your recordings in the Finder.

If you have any ideas on how to make Iris’ naming and tagging better contact us or sign up for the Iris beta ad MacDeveloper.net.

You may not be aware, but there is a new Time Lord coming and it’s not the one you are probably thinking of. The new Time Lord that I’m talking about is Iris.

Marcus, the artist working on Iris, had a special request for Iris. Artists are a temperamental bunch, so usually it’s better to just give them what they want. In this case, Marcus wanted to make time lapse recordings of his work to post as demos. So, we set out to add this feature to Iris. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

You can specify to capture at a certain frame rate or you can specify the amount of time between frames. Then it’s as simple as specifying how much you would like to speed up or slow down the video. In this example we’ll get a 30fps movie that is playing back 3 times faster than usual. Check out the videos below to see a demo of speeding up the captured movie.

I hope users find this feature useful. I know Marcus will. If you have a moment you should check out the inspiration for this feature at his website, digitalmanipulation.com. I’m sure he’ll be posting some recordings of how his creations are made soon.

Throughout the development of Iris we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how Iris will fit into your workflow. One area that doesn’t seem that important, but profoundly affects the way Iris integrates with the rest of your system is file naming.

Some screen recorders give you a few choices of how to name files. This just isn’t good enough for Iris. We want to let you name your recordings any way you want, but it also has to be easy to use. Starting from scratch we’ve come up with token variable based file naming that I think users will really love.

Take a look below for a preview. This UI isn’t final, but it gives you a good idea of what we’re doing

If you can think of some variables that should be added to the list let us know. Automatic naming will make its debut in our next beta which will be sent to testers in the next few days. If you would like a chance to try Iris out early, please join the Iris beta at MacDeveloper.net.