Monday, February 24, 2014
Random note on the return of GIFs
Ars Technica has a cute article on the rebirth of GIF in the world of Tumblr.
Looking at my own output, I can see the same trend. Over the 9 years I've been doing this thing, I've made a lot of loop-type short animations. GIF and SWF are the obvious choices for short anims. I started out doing GIFs (blue line) then shifted to SWF (purple line) then dropped back to GIF.
I don't remember exactly why I thought SWF was better. Probably because you could include interactive elements.... but I only used interactivity once or twice, then decided it was way too much work for a blog with zero readers.
I remember clearly why I came back to GIF. It's a simple reason that isn't mentioned in the Ars Technica article. In building a GIF from still frames, it's easy to set a separate time interval for each frame. You can't do it in SWF. (At least in the tools I was using.) Efficient looping depends crucially on setting the interval for individual frames. Often you want a long pause on the last frame to establish a clear start and end for the loop; sometimes you have several static periods in the middle. In GIF you can set these intervals directly; in SWF you have to copy the frame image repeatedly to get a 'stay'.
= = = = =
Linguistic sidenote: The inventor of the GIF insists that it should be pronounced jif. He's wrong. He's operating on a false theory that G before a front vowel is automatically /dʒ/. This simply isn't a rule in English. It's a rule in Italian and Church Latin. Some words that came in from French or Italian do follow the Italian rule, but most newly introduced words use the 'hard' /g/ regardless of front/back vowel. When encountering an unfamiliar word, we favor /g/.
Consider Gilbey's Gin, give, gyp, gimmick, gimlet, gimbal, gimp, giblet, and especially gift. No firm rule either way, but the tendency is toward /g/ instead of /dʒ/.
¶ 7:35 AM 
I don't remember exactly why I thought SWF was better. Probably because you could include interactive elements.... but I only used interactivity once or twice, then decided it was way too much work for a blog with zero readers.
I remember clearly why I came back to GIF. It's a simple reason that isn't mentioned in the Ars Technica article. In building a GIF from still frames, it's easy to set a separate time interval for each frame. You can't do it in SWF. (At least in the tools I was using.) Efficient looping depends crucially on setting the interval for individual frames. Often you want a long pause on the last frame to establish a clear start and end for the loop; sometimes you have several static periods in the middle. In GIF you can set these intervals directly; in SWF you have to copy the frame image repeatedly to get a 'stay'.
= = = = =
Linguistic sidenote: The inventor of the GIF insists that it should be pronounced jif. He's wrong. He's operating on a false theory that G before a front vowel is automatically /dʒ/. This simply isn't a rule in English. It's a rule in Italian and Church Latin. Some words that came in from French or Italian do follow the Italian rule, but most newly introduced words use the 'hard' /g/ regardless of front/back vowel. When encountering an unfamiliar word, we favor /g/.
Consider Gilbey's Gin, give, gyp, gimmick, gimlet, gimbal, gimp, giblet, and especially gift. No firm rule either way, but the tendency is toward /g/ instead of /dʒ/.
¶ 7:35 AM
