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GIF animations to document blogs

Jan Cumps

In the past I used videos, with talk, or without talk, to explain dynamic behaviour of projects.
Lately, when I thought it made sense, I switched to short snippets showing behaviour. And when short enough (seconds) to animated GIFs.

image
I don't really like the silent videos, but the silent GIFs in a story work for me.
Like Jupyter executable notebooks, this allows to show behaviour. It also makes blogs a bit "busy/alive" depending on taste.

Thoughts?

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  • Personally I think they are a great idea provided they are not overly used, or showing way too much to interpret (as I think Andrew also suggests). They provide for a way for people to peek into your world of testing or whatever, without the user having to make much effort. 

    Regarding the 'too much to interpret', I have that problem with understanding some photos. Not all need annotations or a description, but sometimes it is really hard to understand what the writer intended to show in a photo without a big arrow to point things out. For sure video can help too, but there is the significant overhead of video creation, getting the audio and lighting just right, etc., it's not always appropriate.

    Similarly (but differently), it would be nice to see the image system improved one day for static images too, because today it is a lot of clicking just to peek into areas of someones project photos. This looked really neat, it works with pinch-to-zoom and mouse scroll button: https://openseadragon.github.io/  (Edit:) Looks like openseadragon can be adapted to work with animated GIFs too: https://codepen.io/antonioxdias/pen/JmZova  

    Also, SVG support one day would be awesome, since then everything is searchable [example use-case for this is circuit diagrams]. Even SVG animations could be interesting then. I suspect element14'ers are pushing the boundaries of traditional blogs way more than other websites.

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  • Personally I think they are a great idea provided they are not overly used, or showing way too much to interpret (as I think Andrew also suggests). They provide for a way for people to peek into your world of testing or whatever, without the user having to make much effort. 

    Regarding the 'too much to interpret', I have that problem with understanding some photos. Not all need annotations or a description, but sometimes it is really hard to understand what the writer intended to show in a photo without a big arrow to point things out. For sure video can help too, but there is the significant overhead of video creation, getting the audio and lighting just right, etc., it's not always appropriate.

    Similarly (but differently), it would be nice to see the image system improved one day for static images too, because today it is a lot of clicking just to peek into areas of someones project photos. This looked really neat, it works with pinch-to-zoom and mouse scroll button: https://openseadragon.github.io/  (Edit:) Looks like openseadragon can be adapted to work with animated GIFs too: https://codepen.io/antonioxdias/pen/JmZova  

    Also, SVG support one day would be awesome, since then everything is searchable [example use-case for this is circuit diagrams]. Even SVG animations could be interesting then. I suspect element14'ers are pushing the boundaries of traditional blogs way more than other websites.

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