Blippy Reborn - GIF's on your iPhone

allthingsd.com

29 points·ericwu01··10 comments

Slick tool --

Definitely amplifies the ability of anyone to create novel GIFs to share with friends.

Something tells me there is a pretty big audience for this tool. I dig it!

Animated GIF are the worse-is-better solution of moving images, yet I can't argue with their popularity.

what are the main problems with animated GIFs in your mind? for us being playable in just about every context on the web/mobile was really important

One problem that I can think of is that the palette for each frame is restricted to 255 colors. That being said, there really isn't any other widely-supported option at this point :-).

I like the app concept! Nice work!

Blippy co-founder here. Yes, GIF is a really old format. We have to work a lot on optimizing for performance. Surprising that it is the only popular one that allowed any animation. Others like Animated PNG did not take off.

Most animated GIF 'players' have zero controls for play, pause, feedback for buffering. It doesn't handle audio, and file sizes are huge.

yup, we had to tradeoff controls, buffering, audio, and filesize for ubiquity of consumption and simplicity of user experience (i.e. inline/autoplay). Have you tried gifs in an iMessage? They're really fun to add to your texting!

My first thought was "what do automated sharing of purchases have to do with animated GIFs?"

hahaha... well, they're both silly ideas? :)

We're really excited to bring GIFs to the iPhone!

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