Techies: GIF or Flash? (laptop, how to, working, website)
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I'm working on a website. On the home page, I am going to put an animation and I need some advice on whether to create the animation as a GIF or in Flash.
Part of the animation will be the image of a person but one of the person's extended arms will wave 'hi." Another part of the animation will be text that will bounce in time with the arm movement.
My concern is that the animation should work on regular laptop as well as mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets.
Based on the above, which will have an easier time loading/operating on all types of computers and devices? GIFS or Flash?
My advice is to skip the animation and the bouncing text. Quite frankly it's cheesy.
If you must gif is going to be more compatible however it has some severe limitations. They are ideal for small animations or static images without a lot of color. Smilies for example. For video type animations not so good, with the right software it can reproduce well however you need to use dithering which drives the file size through the roof.
It really depends on what you are trying to do. Is it a transparent background? Video with real person?
Yes, transparent background. The site is somewhat quirky in nature.
You have the software for making this? Gif animation software is not very common and it's not exactly something with no experience is going to do. See if you can find an old copy of Photoimpact that includes their .gif animation package.
The issue with gif and transparency is it's either a color of not. If you have different colors on canvas you'll either end up with choppy edges or a fringe. That fringe is used to blend it into the background however the color of the fringe is dependent on the background. This icon is designed to be a on a light colored background.
There is no such thing as an animated .jpg and it doesn't support transparency. In the past you could take a .gif and change the extension to .jpg and browsers would display it as animated. I would suspect that most browsers are checking that common extensions match the header and will not display it if they don't match. Whatever the case it's still a .gif.
There is no other standard image format that supports animation that I'm aware of, there is some kind of non standard .png but there is no browser support.
You could have a script to display a bunch of single .jpg's to simulate an animation but if you are goin to go that route you might as well use .png. That supports alpha transparency where the background color can bleed through the image. You can take this image here and the shadow will look right on any background.
I think you have to consider how it will affect visitors to your site. Most users don't like animated web pages regardless of how much the developer thinks they'll attract more attention. If you look around the Web, you'll find plenty of tutorials like this one to show users how to block animations: How to block animated gifs in Firefox from playing automatically - gHacks Tech News
When I come across animated sites I'll immediately use an adblocker to disable them since I don't want to have to tolerate something animated which is going to distract me when I'm trying to read whatever's on there.
There are also add-ons for Firefox which can be used to disable them temporarily without actually removing them from view altogether such as this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...rstop/?src=api I use that one myself to disable the rain cloud animation on my local weather station which would otherwise restart itself every ten seconds.
But the fact that these kinds of tools are available is also yet another indication that most users don''t like them.
ifones and ipads dont render flash animation because they are too dependant on the cpu (cuts down battery life). flash sux anyways.
Iphones and ipads don't render flash because apple has not allowed flash on them. Their excuse is that they want to push new technology like the features available in HTML5. I don't believe that, preventing "unapproved" third party software is pure business to protect their cash cow the app store. This is something that should be left up to the consumer, by limiting your choices you will pay more.
A pure flash animation can use CPU however that reduces bandwidth usage. If for example you were going to have bouncing ball doing with gif or video you need at least 10 frames a second. So you basically have at least 10 images for each second. With a flash animation it has a set of directions instead, you don't even need an image becsue you just make a set a directions to draw one. You can bounce it and mve it all over the place for endless amount of time with a far less file size than a couple of seconds of image based animation.
In any event flash will die on it's own, it's bridge and primary use has been for the delivery of video and it will no longer be needed for that purpose with HTML5. In that regards the CPU and bandwidth are going to be about the same regardless of the delivery system.
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