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The Mobile Experience Lab recently released FLIPR, an Android app that facilitates collaborative creation of location-based animated gifs with mobile devices.
One of the designers from MEL, Steve Pomeroy, recently chatted with the Fast Company blog FastCoLabs about the project. Snip:
Q: Are still images and motion picture beginning to merge?
A: It’s funny–for our mobile app we actually render the animations as video, as a proper lossy video codec can shave off an order of magnitude worth of bits from the weight of the animation. Also, mobiles often struggle to play one-megabyte animated GIFs, in part due to a lack of native hardware decoding. I worry that one day I’ll see animated GIF encoding/decoding becoming a SOIC feature, right alongside MPEG4. For rendering the animated GIFs, we use Imagemagick; for our video processing, we use ffmpeg.
