Craig Gidney's blog has some .gifs which directly link to the corresponding simulation on Quirk. For example:
Grover Search
Delayed Eraser
Is it possible to create these .gifs from within Quirk? Or does one need to use some third-party software?
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asked Feb 17 '19 at 11:59
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I made those GIFs using the screen recorder ScreenToGif.
ScreenToGif is not very good at compressing while maintaing quality, so I found it worked better to disable all optimizations while recording, try to preserve all detail, then post-process using GIMP's "Optimize (for GIF)" filter. GIMP is also handy for e.g. adding the text labels you see in the images.
(There was an old dev version of Quirk that had a "record cycle" button, but it was incredibly slow and didn't produce decent results [you have to find javascript code to encode the GIF data, and you often want to vary the framerate because some things look fine at low rates but some don't] so I dropped it.)
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$\begingroup$ Thanks for the answer! I'll check out ScreenToGif. One issue I noticed with the .gifs on your blog (and even the Quirk simulations) is that they're a bit too fast. It would be nice to have a slowdown feature on Quirk. I'm not sure if ScreenToGif or GIMP can help with that, but I found that it's possible to slow them down using GIF speed changer. Mentioning, just in case someone in the future faces the same problem. :) $\endgroup$ – Sanchayan Dutta Feb 17 '19 at 21:34
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1$\begingroup$ @Blue It's quite hard to pick a "good" speed for the gifs, and especially for Quirk itself, because people want different amounts of focus at different times. I just eyeball it to where I'm sorta-kinda happy each time. $\endgroup$ – Craig Gidney Feb 18 '19 at 1:40
