I’ve become very fond of attaching animated GIF’s of new UI elements when I create pull requests at Firmafon. Recording a part of the screen is very easy using Quicksilver’s built-in screen recording and trimming features. Then when done, open the file in GIF Brewery and make it a gif. I usually lock the FPS to 15 and use the Simple Palette.

So far so good, we have a gif. Let’s put it somewhere we can reference. Imgur is great and keeps the images around for a long enough time for our colleagues to see it on Github. Luckily a command-line client for imgur already exists so grab imguru from Github and put it in ~/bin (or anywhere you’d like).

Quicksilver knows Applescript and supports custom actions in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions, so open up AppleScript Editor.app and make a script with the following:

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
  on open theFile
    try
      set filePath to POSIX path of theFile
      set theCommand to "~/bin/imguru '" & filePath & "'"
      return do shell script theCommand
    on error e number n
      return e
    end try
  end open
  
  -- Tell Quicksilver we only work with files
  on get direct types
    return {"NSFilenamesPboardType"}
  end get direct types
end using terms from

Save it as Upload to imgur.scpt or something like it and you might have to restart Quicksilver and you’re there.