And then I was like ...
Three months ago, Ellen and I soft-launched And then I was like, a web app that lets you make animated gifs with your webcam. Our basic goals were to:
- Make something fun.
- Try our hands at working together on a project.
- Work with some interesting new technologies.
- Seed the world with more than the same warmed-over gallery of gifs that make the rounds on tumblr, reframing the gif as a more participatory medium.
I learned a lot from building the site, and then quite a bit more after launching it. This week I took what I learned from how people were using it, did a lot of this:
…and released an update to And then I was like focused on better/faster gif-making.
Since it launched, I’ve tried four or five different methods for optimizing how the gifs are made and saved, focusing primarily on a workflow that creates gifs as quickly as possible. I’m now using a great JavaScript library called gif.js to convert the individual frames to a gif on the client side (using web workers), and as a result the process of converting and saving a gif is about ten times faster than at launch (from about 15-20 seconds to 2 seconds or less).
I’ve also streamlined the process from visiting the site to making a gif. You’re never prompted to sign in (though you can still log in and associate your gifs with an account if you want to).
When you’re making a gif — in addition to changing the way gifs loop — you can now adjust playback speed (see speedy-typing gif above).
Last, if you’ve got an Android phone, you can make gifs in Chrome for Android using your phone’s camera.
If you’re interested in giving it a try, it’s just one click away (no login required). If you’ve got feedback, please don’t hesitate to share.