explainroo 0.6: record your real app

explainroo 0.6 records your real app. Your agent writes the clicks and the typing as steps. explainroo plays them in a browser of its own and saves the video. A scene then shows it with a pointer and zooms that land on the narration.

Record the real app

explainroo record runs the steps in recordings/<name>.json in a clean browser. It saves the video with a log of every step. Steps click and type like a person. A zoom step brings the camera close, and a mark names a moment for the narration. record --inspect <url> lists the buttons and fields of a page with a selector for each one, so the agent never has to guess what a page holds. See recording the real app.

s.recording plays the recording in a scene. A step with a cue happens on its word, and the recording waits for the narration when it has to. See playing a recording.

The browser asks the site for the project’s language, so an English video shows the English site. blur hides email addresses and keys on every page. When a page keeps a secret sharp anyway, record stops and keeps no video. check warns when the page’s text would play too small on a phone, and names the viewport that fixes it. See which viewport to use.

When an app can’t be recorded, s.ui still rebuilds its screens in the app’s colors and fonts. See rebuilding the screens.

Formats

A format is a ready way to make one kind of video, with a guide for the agent and a whole example video. Four come with explainroo:

• product-launch
• product-ad
• narrated-explainer
• vertical-short

explainroo init videos/x --format product-ad starts a video from one. Anyone can publish a format in a Git repository. explainroo formats add <address> shows what it will run before it installs anything. See formats.

The list of sizes moved from explainroo formats to explainroo sizes.

A new look

New projects start in studio, a light look where every title and card follows one size scale. A card with a color gets a band of that color along its top. See the studio look.

Tall videos

In a tall video for an app like TikTok, pictures may now fill the whole frame. Text stays in the safe area. The short kit keeps its stickers off titles and pictures, and its words follow the video’s language. check finds text under the watermark, also when the camera zooms in. See filling the frame.

Any video, and your own recordings

check and verify take a video made with any tool. They report:

• blank and frozen stretches
• silence and loudness
• text too small for a phone
• with --script, the words of your script the speech model didn’t hear

still and sheet show frames of any video file, also a phone video shot upright. See checking any video.

explainroo cut talk.mp4 writes the words of your recording with their times. Delete words and pauses in that file, and cut --apply writes the shorter video with clean joins. See cutting your own recording.

s.clip plays part of a file with from and to, and crop cuts a clip or an image to the part you need. So one long screen recording can serve every scene. See video clips.

Languages and the speech check

The speech check reads spelled numbers as digits in four more languages, like “cinco” for 5 in Spanish. It reads an amount like R$ 100 as “cem reais”, and the same goes for dollars and euros. It treats “un’ape” and “un ape” as the same word. See numbers and amounts.

When a word can’t be confirmed, voice quotes the text the voice was given. A "heard" line in video.json accepts a word that is said right but heard another way. See when the check hears a word another way.

s.number writes numbers the way the video’s language does, like 1 050 in French. A line chart can show several lines on one scale. See lists, numbers and charts.

Presenters

A presenter is a clip of a talking person next to your product. explainroo has the connector for presenter services, with a consent rule: no real person’s face or voice without that service’s own consent flow. Every video with an AI presenter carries an AI label. No service is built in yet. When a service gives no price for a clip, presenter buys nothing. See presenters.

A fix for keys in errors

When a posting service echoed your key back in an error, publish could show it in its output and save it in history/. It now hides the key everywhere it writes, and so does every other command that shows a service’s error. explainroo 0.5 had the same problem, so update to 0.6 if you post with it.

Older projects keep their look

A project made before keeps its frames until you add "defaults": "0.6" to its video.json. The line brings the new look, like text on one size scale and titles that break into lines of even length. init writes it into every new project. Look at the stills again after you add it, because labels may move. See the defaults of 0.6.

One fix applies to every project: the zoom transition no longer shows the frame drawn before it.

Also

• "transition": "push" moves the new scene in and the old one out side by side, so the text of two scenes never shows in one place.
• explainroo clean takes out the frames in build/ that the next run makes again, and says how much room that frees.
• "music": { "volume": 0.35 } makes the music quieter and keeps the look’s style. verify says how far the music sits under the voice.
• verify --size tiktok checks the file that render --size tiktok wrote.

The full list is in the release notes on GitHub.