Image: Gizmodo / Alex Cranz

Apple packed a bunch of cool new features into the new iOS 11 update coming later this year, but it’s possible none of those are cooler than a simple screen capturing tool that makes it easier than ever to record videos of your iPhone in use.


Anyone who previously tried to record screen footage knows how incredibly cumbersome it used to be. You’d have to open QuickTime Player and go through about 10 different steps before you could get even the most basic video of yourself using the device. It was a hot mess.

Not anymore. A few Reddit users testing the developer-only beta of iOS 11 discovered that the new customizable Control Center makes it easy to use a new tool called Screen Recorder. Here’s a quick demo of the new tool:


What’s really cool about the new feature is that after you stop recording, you can make edits and annotations to your recording. As an added bonus, iOS 11 testers say Apple is finally letting users play GIF animations natively in the Photos app. Previously, people could only view GIFs in specific messaging platforms (like WhatsApp or Twitter). This made it difficult on occasion to choose the right GIF saved to your Photos app.

If you dig around enough on Twitter, you’ll find some iOS 11 users already playing around with the new screen capture tool. It easy to imagine how things will quickly escalate once everyone has access to this handy feature.

It looks like Apple is finally giving some much-needed attention to the content creation tools baked into the iPhone. We can’t wait to see what kind of stuff people will cook up.

