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Recording media

Every GIF and screenshot on this site is recorded from the real app, not mocked up.

The demo account

The recordings run against a throwaway account with invented drives. Their addresses are RFC 5737 documentation addresses, ranges reserved for examples that reach nothing on any network, so no real NAS, share or credential ever appears on screen. That is also why the drives read as disconnected and the storage figures are zero.

The recorder

website/scripts/record-media.py does the whole run:

  1. publishes Helix with -p:Company=HelixMedia -p:AssemblyTitle=HelixMedia, which moves its data folder to %LOCALAPPDATA%\HelixMedia so a real install's account and drives are never touched,
  2. starts it, registers the demo account and adds the demo drives and groups,
  3. drives the window through Windows UI Automation, and captures it with PrintWindow, so other windows on the desktop never end up in a frame,
  4. assembles the frames into GIFs with Pillow and saves the stills as PNGs in website/public/media,
  5. stops the app and deletes the demo data folder.
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\pip install pywinauto pillow
.venv\Scripts\python website\scripts\record-media.py

Quit any running Helix first: the single-instance check would hand the launch to it. A few steps click with the real mouse, because the drive rows' chips have no UI Automation pattern to invoke, so leave the machine alone while it runs.

Pass --no-publish to reuse the last published build.

Updating a recording

Change the scene in the script, run it, and commit what changed under website/public/media. Pages reference media by file name:

<Media src="dashboard.png" alt="The Helix dashboard" caption="Optional caption." />

alt is required; caption is optional.

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