I wish people would just record a video and showing what is causing them a problem. It's better than writing "I'm trying to do x and it doesn't work". At least on a video I can see the exact error message, the view they are on which browser they are using etc.

You can condition people to give you all this information but it's an uphill battle, so I'd rather just get it myself from the source if possible.

I feel like there's a misunderstanding here where people think engineers will now record videos instead of writing their usual issue description. This is clearly not the use case of Loom.

My experience has been contrary to expecting developers to create videos (which is a good idea too). This approach of video first, and video tickets are prioritized has been my only approach for almost 15 years.

It started with Jing from Techsmith that had one key feature like loom - record and auto upload to the cloud and put the URL into your clipboard ready to paste into an email.

It’s surprising use of video in this way isn’t more ubiquitous.

Loom might actually be able to do the very thing you are saying it can’t. They have a few AI features that seems to auto generate a title and summary recently.

Jing was such a brilliant simple concept. For years I used to make it mandatory for my team to install it.

I can't fathom how Techsmith couldn't make that work (although maybe it was just too competitive with Camtasia)... Loom is basically the same thing but limited to a Chrome extension? Or am I missing something?

Jing is similar but loom does a lot more post processing and continues the expansion of the idea.

I used to recommend to clients to pre-install the free Jing on all of their pcs, was awesome.

I am still dreaming of something that would allow a user to file a ticket, have them record audio and video like loom to describe the issue and what they were trying to achieve, and then dump a screen record of the last minute before opening the ticket as well as as much info about the machine's state as possible. And/or maybe connecting to helpdesk with video directly. Existing software comes close but is not quite there yet.

Azure DevOps has a browser extension that can this except record audio of the person speaking what’s happening. Also, the user experience is fine for like… power users, but it’s not super fun to use.

I think logrocket fits the bill for web applications.

>engineers will soon be able to visually log issues in Jira

I see this issue all the time in bug reports and it can be pretty helpful to see a short video on how to replicate the issue. Depending upon the type of user submitting those reports they are often _more_ helpful than straight text because I don't have to have as lengthy back-and-forth Q&A on getting more details.

The free version of Jing used to have a 5 minute limit and it was the perfect constraint to ensure short or multiple videos

Good grief. If the age of YouTube has taught us anything, it's that creating good video of something takes a lot more skill than writing something decent about something. Trying to find the relevant issue in a bunch of unrelated info, within a long writeup, which a user necessarily edits, at least a little, by the nature of writing something out? Pretty easy. Trying to find it in a rambling, 15-minute video? Welp! Good luck, Jira people.

The best thing about video is it tethers me to the speed of the content the rambling, 15-minute video content creator mandated; not the speed I can peruse an article.

Also the first person to invent Ctrl+F for video will be a billionaire.

Not quite Ctrl F, but Loom does use some AI magic to summarize videos and automatically add sections so you can skip to the interesting bits quickly. Only used it once recently, but it perfectly divided my video according to the 3 points I was addressing.

> Also the first person to invent Ctrl+F for video will be a billionaire.

At least YouTube (desktop web) lets you open the (often auto-generated) captions as a transcript on the side.

I don’t use loom, but I remember an interview with someone who had it in their workflow. Isn’t some of Loom’s appeal transcript and video search?

YouTube has transcripts of varying quality, and tools like kagi's universal summarizer can handle videos as well

Look let’s you play back the video faster.

Also has captioning, transcripts and summarization.

For when a bug doesn’t seem possible, video remains invaluable.

> Trying to find the relevant issue in a bunch of unrelated info, within a long writeup, which a user necessarily edits, at least a little, by the nature of writing something out? Pretty easy.

This sentiment is one of the reasons why so much documentation is not good.

Writing good, usable, technical documentation is HARD.

I doubt people will record 15 minute videos to report an issue. From my experience people are much better at recording a relevant video vs. describing the issue in our text.

My experience with enterprise customers is that recording a video is much more effort than typing "the thingy won't foo the bar" ...

That’s mainly because creating and submitting videos is hard with current tools.

It’s super common and reasonable if it saves days and dozens of emails just to replicate

The standards are not nearly the same. A team-internal Loom is not intended to be a viral polished social media clip.

Here's a sample scenario from one of my previous jobs: a PR is not getting reviews. After a day I record a three-minute Loom where I walk through the problem and the solution, and post it on the team's channel. A few hours later the PR is approved, without any synchronous work and without me having to spend twenty minutes thinking out and typing out a blog sized post on Slack on the same topic. If anyone ever feels the need to dig out that commit again, the Loom is still accessible.

Loom found a way to solve real problems without more typing or more meetings, and that's why it's been successful. Slack, by the way, has a "record a clip now" feature that I liked even more than Loom for the purpose; but by that point we already standardized on Loom and Loom is better at organizing clips.

I am going to assume that the userbase of Loom doesn't need to pad videos to 10 Minutes because the algorhithm only suggests videos that have enough space for ads, and I've never heard "Make sure to like and subscribe" and "You can edit your privacy settings here. Speaking of Privacy, did you know that your ISP can read all your stuff? Sign up for a free month of BarfVPN using my link" in any of the videos attached to pull requests or bug reports.

Having users submit a bug by video is literally one of the biggest biggest cheat codes.

Have been using it for a very long time (I still miss Jing!)

There is no emailing back and forth meaninglessly. The user just records and talks about what they want to do and what hats happening.

The support side sees exactly how the user is doing it to make it instantaneous to replicate the issue.

There is no need for the user to give detailed screenshots and type up a whole scenario.

Well, being able to screen record a reproduction of a bug is practical, and it's easy to do it in macOS or Linux, but I'm not sure about this on Windows.

Maybe a unified tool with a better integration will allow better bug reports, but pep talks by management at scale? No, thanks.

Is it easy to do on macOS if system sound is needed to demonstrate the bug?

There are dummy drivers which bypass that limitation when required. I didn't install them, since I never needed sound to demonstrate something.

Ok thanks. Still not as trivially easy as it should be then :(

No, it's very easy: https://existential.audio/blackhole/

Blackhole is Free and Open Source.

Also, Rogue Amoeba has a product called "Loopback". It's not cheap, but it's another alternative: https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/

I tried Loopback as a paid user, and it wasn't nearly as stable/reliable as you would reasonably hope if you're an ex-Windows user converting to MacOS.

It still boggles my mind that there is no "Stereo mix" built-in.

Yeah I’m aware of Blackhole but honestly these sorts of hacks are fine for me a software engineer but not for regular users which is what trivially easy means to me.

There is no good reason it’s not possible in Quicktime to record the system audio along with the screen.

Not sure with the OS tool, but QuickTime is on all Macs and it's screen recorder can record system audio and/or microphone audio easily.

You can't record system audio without extra software and configuration that is not trivial to set up. It's not an option for the average user.

Video is one of those things everyone thinks everyone else would want but when faced with using it themselves they find it violently annoying. i.e. ideal for enterprise sales.

That said there is a niche of user testing video capture and so on, but that is not what this is.

> personalized welcome videos

Kill me please.

If the alternative is going back into the office to watch it in person I will take the video.

...and transcribed and then summarized

On mute

We actually do some of that with Loom, mainly recording app bugs for others to repro, or demoing new features so code reviewers know how to test the feature. The videos are often short, less than 2 mins.

I would love to have this, as someone that has to use Jira. Instead we have to extensively talk to QA (not too bad) or BAs/POs (usually bad) to figure out what someone's problem is.

Managers and leadership.

Those are Atlssian’s customers.

I know someone who just had an issue, they couldn't get any screen recorder through security. This is probably a good way around that.

And yet they still haven’t implemented CD burning. >:-(

I do all of these things with loom today and love it.

I used to do that but you can record screen video with the Snipping Tool now. Works fine, mp4 file as output.

Where I’ve worked Game Mode was disabled by GPO in enterprise environments.

Disabling a built-in, non-networked feature and then replacing it with a cloud-linked, self-updating 3rd-party one doesn't seem like it would improve security.

They were using on-prem Atlassian, no cloud link and no self-updating, of course.

Generation TikTok?