Should I just close the feature request on Screenify Studio? I only thought the customer's request was cool, but now I’m adding a fifth layer of motion for lights and shadows. It looks nice, but idk if it’ll be useful in practice. Performance testing shows there's not much drop.

In the past, every time I had to film a product demo, I had to drag my laptop and phone to a café or some nice spot to shoot. Now I don’t need to anymore. I’ve got everything I need on Screenify.studio Hope other builders find this useful. If you like a particular environment style, let me know so I can add it.

a user asked me: “For product demos, background music matters a lot. How can I automatically pick the right mood when I have zero taste in music?” My response: “Same. I don’t have any taste either.” So naturally, we put it on the roadmap. 😅 For Screenify Studio, we’re planning to automatically match background music to the beats, pacing, and mood of your demo video. But we haven’t built that part yet. For now, we’re doing the simpler thing: adding more tracks across different moods so users have better options to choose from. Automatic music matching? That can wait. One problem at a time. Ship what’s useful first.

Talking to customers early on helps eliminate that 80% of unnecessary stuff and lets you focus on the 20% that really matters. But the problem is, no one tells you where to find those first customers who are willing to talk when you don't have a product yet. PS: I'm still working on these mockup styles, even if some say, "What mockups? They're all AI-generated."

The thing nobody tells you about writing your own render engine: The preview inside my app runs on an off-the-shelf 3D library — clear glass, wood grain, real reflections, all of it automatic. The export engine I wrote by hand, from scratch, so it could render fast. Which means every single thing that's "free" in the preview, I have to rebuild myself. This week I hand-built it all over again: physically-based lighting for the desk, see-through glass on the screen, a smooth 400ms transition between shots. Exhausting? Yeah. But that's the price of exporting high-quality video without it crawling like a snail. Two engines = double the work — and the user only ever sees one smooth result. 🎬 #buildinpublic #indiedev

User reported a screen leak issue when zooming with Device Frame. Spent an entire afternoon fixing it. But it's all good now. Getting ready to release @ScreenifyStudio version 1.8.2.

v1.8 of @ScreenifyStudio 🚀 It started as a screen recorder. This release leans hard into one audience: iOS developers. You can now: – record a physical iPhone/iPad over USB (live mirror included) - Wrap every iPhone recording in a photo-realistic 3D device stage and direct the camera with 18 hand-crafted cinematic motion presets. – drop touch indicators by hand – export App Store - spec preview videos – clean up the Simulator status bar in one toggle Still early, still building in public. Tell me what's missing for your workflow.

Shipped Screenify Studio v1.7 🚀 If you ship iOS apps, this release is for you: → Record a real iPhone or iPad over USB — with a live mirror so you see exactly what you're capturing → Touch indicators — tap ripples you place by hand (a touchscreen has no cursor to track) → App Store Preview export — videos that match Apple's specs out of the box → Clean Status Bar for the Simulator — 9:41, full battery, full signal, one toggle Next up: a dedicated panel for the touch/device controls, and transparent (alpha) exports for app overlays. Building this in the open — feedback welcome 👇

ShipIt: Version 1.6.3 was released today. It includes small improvements focused on optimizing exported videos for web usage, along with a fix for incorrect timing when recording the iOS Simulator during app development.

Day #153 Building Screenify.Studio Just shipped Smart Zoom Studio in Screenify v1.6 🎬 Three zoom modes for cinematic demos: → Simple — one zoom, one focus → Keyframe — multi-state with per-frame hold + easing → Storyboard — draw zoom rectangles right on the canvas 12 per-keyframe 3D effect presets. Take the camera. Direct the shot.

Day #145 building Screenify Studio. The past 10 days I've been deep in 3 sprints to overhaul the entire multi-source, multi-layer architecture. Today they shipped, and Screenify is finally ready to turn screen recording into something fundamentally different. Before: timeline = a single recording source. After: timeline = mix of recording + imported images + imported videos + groundwork for "record more" appended to existing projects. What users can do now: • Drag-and-drop images and videos from Finder into the editor • Mix multiple video sources with fit modes (cover/contain/fill) • Imported audio mixed cleanly into the export • Callouts, zooms, 3D transforms work on any source type • Both Metal and Standard export pipelines render multi-source timelines correctly 50+ bugs fixed across the 3 sprints. The hardest part wasn't building features — it was getting the architecture right. Lesson #1: Five failed fixes is a signal, not a coincidence There was one visual bug that stopped me cold: user plays the timeline, replays it, and on the second pass the first video crops down to 37% of its actual frame. I tried 5 fixes: • Skip seek-to-end → wrong root cause • Force-refresh pixelWidth every frame → GPU buffer cache stayed stale • Reset texture.frame + updateUvs → texture frame isn't the GPU buffer • Wrap _onPlayStart with depth=3 guard → fixed recursion, didn't fix the resize artifact • Pre-create textures, recreate Texture instances → texture instance is independent of the underlying GPU buffer I should have stopped after attempt #2. That's my new 2-strike rule. Lesson #2: Build a POC before committing to architecture I finally built 3 side-by-side POC HTMLs to test: A) Pixi VideoSource swapping src (current approach):❌ B) CanvasSource + drawImage per frame: ❌ C) Two separate VideoSources, swap sprite.texture only:✅ One hour of POC saved me days of building in the wrong direction. Pixi v8 has a hidden bug: when source.pixelWidth shrinks (3456 →1280), the GPU buffer and UV mapping don't re-allocate. There's no line-level fix — you have to eliminate src swap entirely. Lesson #3: A real refactor means LESS code The new pool architecture: each clip gets a dedicated

Users don’t care where the button is. They care what changes after clicking it. Demo the outcome. Not the interface tour.

The first 5 seconds of your demo matter more than the next 55. In 5 seconds users decide: is this polished? is this trustworthy? is this for me? should I keep watching? Most demos lose here.

Great products often look average because the demo is flat. No motion. No zoom. No emphasis. No rhythm. People mistake boring presentation for boring product.

Day #139 building @ScreenifyStudio 41 bugs in 10 days. Adding one "Insert Image" button to a screen recorder → had to fix the playback engine, 2 export engines, 3 time systems, audio mixer, cursor overlay, camera layer. 44 commits. 21,000 lines of code. What the user sees: drag an image onto the timeline. Done ✨ #buildinpublic

Hot take: Your OG image matters more than your landing page. Because people see the OG image BEFORE they decide to visit your site. Yet most founders treat it as an afterthought — or worse, just screenshot their hero section and call it done. Stop. Here's the cheat sheet: 1. Design for 1200x630. Not your homepage aspect ratio. 2. One headline, readable at thumbnail size. If it wraps at 300px, it's too long. 3. One brand color. Not a rainbow. 4. Show your domain, not a decorative gradient. 5. Add ONE visual that says what your product does. App screenshot with subtle 3D tilt > generic illustrations. 6. Test the actual preview on Twitter, Slack, iMessage before shipping. Your OG image is a 0.3-second pitch. Design it like one.

55% of my traffic comes from mobile. My mobile experience was scoring 63 on Lighthouse. Basically unusable for half the people landing on the page. Spent the last few days fixing it. Up to 90 now. Hoping this stops me from bleeding potential users before they even see what the product does. How much does mobile performance actually matter for your landing page?

#ShipIT AI Background Removal. 5ms per frame. Neural Engine. Completely offline. >> Messy home office → gone. >> Replace with blur, solid color, or custom image. >> Real-time preview. No internet. No API key. We are continuously enhancing our features to better serve users who prefer not to reveal their faces.

Today's bug: callout borders looked perfect in preview, but paper-thin in the exported video. Root cause: when zooming in, the frame scales up but borders kept their original pixel size. The fix was one multiplication. Finding WHERE to multiply was the real challenge 😅 #buildinpublic

#ShipIt 150+ backgrounds, 9 categories, and more.... Gradient, Solid, Mesh, Dark, Minimal, Abstract, Bokeh, Video loops... For indie founders without a design team. screenify.studio