Disney this week launched a new keyboard app for iOS called "Disney Gif." As the name suggests, the app allows you to browse through, and quickly share from, a library of animated GIF images and emoji icons featuring Disney content.
For its launch, the keyboard features hundreds of images pulled from Disney's expansive TV and movie collection, including Star Wars, Frozen, Beauty and the Beast, Inside Out, The Lion King and various hit television shows from ABC.
You could say I'm not a big fan of intrusive autoplay videos in apps, not to mention those pesky autoplay video ads on some websites. With that in mind, I was taken aback when Twitter announced today adding this very feature to its iPhone and iPad application and the web interface.
Now when you stumble upon a tweet with an embedded Vine, animated GIF or a clip in Twitter's native format, it will begin to play back automatically.
It's all part of the grand plan to shove advertising down our throat though Twitter would have us believe it's trying to make our lives easier so we could “keep up with the action without missing a tweet and get a better sense of what’s been shared instantly.”
Because autoplay videos suck your cellular data, this feature is a major concern in this age of non-unlimited plans. True, Twitter promises to opt out of autoplay anyone who's on a high-rate data plan, but I'd rather trust my instincts and revert back to the old-school click-to-play experience.
Thankfully, there's an easy way to do just that.
Imgur back in March 2015 released a much improved iPhone client for browsing the fascinating world of animated GIFs, replacing its original iOS app which got removed from the App Store due to user complaints.
Tuesday, they refreshed the software with a key feature request from many users: the ability to directly upload your own images and animated GIFs to the service. Previously, you had to use a different app to send your memes to the service or resort to using the web interface.
Following its 2012 debut and 90,000 downloads later, GIF Finder for iOS is no more. As of now, the free app is no longer available in the App Store.
According to its UK-based developer Matt Cheetham, Apple took issue with the software, which takes the pain out of finding GIFs to reply with quickly on iOS, because it included “content or features that resemble various well-known, third-party marks, including Disney characters.”
I secretly love GIFs. Well, maybe it is not such a secret since my best friend regularly sends me links to funny ones. Snort-level laughter usually follows. You may not always want to create funny micro movies with your camera, though. Sometimes, you may just want to liven up a still shot.
GIFx is a photo-editing app that adds GIF backgrounds to your pictures and videos. Now, you can make moving photographs without having to actually create a GIF first.
Bustio is a new app released in the App Store that will turn your burst photos into animated GIFs or videos, which you can then save to your Camera Roll or share with others via several channels.
The concept is pretty simple. After taking a series of photos in burst mode with your iPhone camera, simply launch Burstio, and select the burst of photos you want to use. From there you have the option to adjust the playback speed from slow, to normal, to fast. Then hit the export button to convert the burst photos into an HD video or an animated GIF.
Riffsy has added to the onslaught of third party keyboards we've seen since iOS 8 launched last week with its new GIF Keyboard. It installs natively, and as the name suggests, it allows you to quickly send a variety of animated GIFs directly from your keyboard.
While it may sound gimmicky, the app has a library of "millions" of GIFs that Riffsy has collected over the past year. And since many of them are tagged with hashtags, it's actually pretty easy to search for and find a specific GIF that conveys your current mood.
You're probably aware that Twitter began supporting animated GIFs via its web interface in mid-June. If so, you may also recall that Twitter's iOS client has picked up support for this popular file format a mere week later.
The feature isn't exclusive to the company's own mobile apps: Twitter soon after updated its API to let makers of third-party clients implement direct GIF sharing via pic.twitter.com links.
Tapbots' Tweetbot, one of the best Twitter clients for the Mac and iOS devices, does not officially recognize animated GIFs. That's why tapping a pic.twitter.com GIF link in Tweetbot for iPhone opens the detail view for the tweet itself rather than play the embedded animation inline.
This has been driving me nuts - but not anymore. As it turns out, Tapbots yesterday issued a maintenance update to Tweetbot for the iPhone and iPod touch which apparently adds support for animated GIFs via Twitter's pic.twitter.com links. Strangely enough, the official release notes make no mention of this nice little addition whatsoever...
Last Wednesday, the micro-blogging platform Twitter started rolling out native support for animated GIFs to its mobile apps for iOS and Android, as well as to its web interface available on Twitter.com.
Initiaily, the free iPhone and iPad app didn't gain the feature at the time of the announcement as the firm needed more time to implement animated GIFs on backend side.
This morning, Twitter version 6.8 has surfaced in the App Store featuring - you guessed right - the ability to upload animated GIFs from your iPhone and iPad and view them rendered inline, right inside your timelines...
Twitter, the leading micro-blogging platform, is rolling out native support for animated GIFs to its mobile apps and across the web.
By adding native GIF support to both the web interface on Twitter.com and mobile apps on iOS and Android, the startup has finally jumped on the trendy bus of GIF memes.
Twitter's free iPhone and iPad app wasn't updated at post time though the company said in a tweet that "starting today, you can share and view animated GIFs on Twitter.com, Android and iPhone". As it turns out, no software update will be needed as Twitter has confirmed that GIFs will be supported by its official API...
If you've ever saved an animated GIF to your iPhone's Photos app, you've probably realized that the animations don't play as normal. Instead, animated GIFs behave like static images within the Photos app, devoid of any of the animation that makes using GIFs so fun.
GIFViewer is a brand new jailbreak tweak that solves this problem. It, upon installation, allows you to view animated GIFs that are saved to the stock Photos app. Have a look at our video walkthrough inside for a demonstration of how it works.
Pinterest, the popular social scrapbooking site, updated its iOS client today, bringing the app to version 3.4. The change log for the update only says "we just made Pinterest a little better for you," but the company's blog says they've added GIF support.
Users can now pin GIFs directly to their pinboards, which will show up in feeds (on the web, or within the mobile app) with a small play button. GIFs can then be played via mobile, shared to other social networks and of course repinned across platforms...