Animated PNG from the story

I use Sketcher to deliver screen mockups to business groups. They themselves have no Sketcher installed, so I convert individual screens to PNG. So far so good.

The problem arises when I try to present them a story. I cannot export it as an animated PNG, so I have to send a bunch of PNGs along with the comments in the email saying "step 1 is Builder.PNG, step 2 is Builder2.PNG, ..." and so on.

Since email is often forwarded between groups (e.g. between business and QA) the comments got lost somewhere down in the email trail. File names are not often numbers, they rather named after the specific step in the workflows (i.e. "UserEntersCredentials.PNG") so the file set alone is not ordered now... you can imagine the confusion.

So, the feature request is easy: let me export a story into animated PNG!

Vladimir,

I have the Storyboard export on my list. Don't you think a different format would be more suited? For example a PDF with one screen per page? Another option is to export images along with some HTML files linked in the right order. However this second format is less email friendly.

My main concern with animated images is that the client can't control what part of the story he sees at one point. I see how the animation can be interesting sometimes but sure it's not the preferred way to present a storyboard.

Yeah, I was thinking about lack of control, but considered it's OK to let me enter the inter-frame delay... but PDF export is actually better, especially (and that's the second feature) you'd let to annotate every screen in the story and place those comments into PDF too.

BTW, a minor feature: it would be a time-saver if I could do "make a copy" on the story screen. Screens are usually change only in a few elements, so I wish I could make a copy of the whole screen from the story page, which would add the new screen to the end of the story and open it for editing.

Yes, I was thinking about adding a description property to storyboard screens. I'll add this to my list.

Vladimir, I am not sure about this screen copy feature. So far I've seen that master screens are preferred in this scenario. Basically you extract common parts into a master screen and then use it to create derived screens. Then you can change the master screen and see the changes propagated automatically. What do you think of this approach?

Vladimir,

I've just added PDF export for screens and storyboards. Storyboards are exported into a multi-page PDF document. I think it should satisfy your request. Find more here:

http://wireframesketcher.com/blog/2009-11-16-export-to-pdf-batch-exports-and-more.html

Any feedback is welcome!