Speaking of Tinder-style card interfaces, Blippy is a rather delightful way to browse among animated GIFs, then add them to a custom iOS keyboard that you can use to punch up text messages, etc.
Now if only the world would devise a non-1980’s standard (y’know, one with more than 256 ill-compressed colors) and call it “GIF+” or something. The open-source WebP standard is less than half the size of a GIF, but it’s not yet widely supported. Maybe we just need to call it “GIF.”
[YouTube]
I always wondered why the MNG (Multiple-image Network Graphics) format never gained any traction, and especially why the industry leader didn’t see it as a worthwhile pursuit for either a standalone app or as a new component to Photoshop/ImageReady. Had it been developed and incorporated into an easy to use UI, GIF animations would have been leapfrogged years ago. Sure, there are people who have a certain nostalgia for 8-bit color-with-1-bit-transparency, it was frustrating in its limitations for those of us who didn’t want to charge head on into buying and learning a full-fledged professional animation authoring system.
Another boat missed, not only by Adobe, but by other developers who couldn’t, or wouldn’t see a way to capitalize on the format’s attractive feature set.