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Gifx adds animations to your photos to create movies, GIFs
Gifx grants anyone the ability to create animated movies and GIFs using a photo or video, plus custom animated effects that the app includes. Overlay one or multiple animations and play around with the opacity to get the desired result on the content you imported. Plus, optionally resize and rearrange the effects to fit specific portions of the image or add masks for more decoration. The app is free with in-app purchases for the iPhone. Animated GIFs were originally popular in the far earlier days of the Internet - I'm talking in the 1990s, but they were basic compared to what they are now. They've been slowly making a comeback for the past few years and now it's hard to visit a popular website without seeing one. Gifx is pretty bare bones in terms of functionality but it does have over 200 animated GIF effects to apply to your photos and videos. This is not the type of GIF creator for making short films or loops. Rather, Gifx is more like an enhancer, turning ordinary photos or footage into something a bit more decorative and flamboyant. Start off by importing an existing photo or video or snapping a new one with the camera, then head straight into the GIF creation process. For testing purposes, you're better off tapping "Free GIFs" to browse the preloaded selection. Most of the options are just wavy, trippy designs that loop continuously over the media in the background. The pink slider adjusts the transparency. Dragging all the way to the right completely hides the underlaying media, which arguably defeats the purpose. I found that in most cases, applying an effect with just about 10 percent opacity makes for a masterful look. It's as if an image itself has movement, as opposed to blatantly appearing as a random effect laid on top of it. Many of the effects have either Instagram icons or locks on them. That's because many of the effects require an in-app purchase to unlock. However, the Basic pack and Mixed pack are free to obtain by completing tasks like following Gifx on Instagram. Otherwise, to get the most bang for your buck, chances are you should take the plunge and buy the "Unlock All" pack, currently 50 percent off at US$3.99. The pack is both a curse and a blessing. It's a curse because many of the features it unlocks should really already be in the app. For instance, to save the images as animated GIFs of high-quality, you need to purchase the pack. For free, Gifx just saves the animations as low-quality, 15-second movies. Even masks cost money. It's almost a bit misleading that the title of the app has "GIF" in it, yet in order to authentically create one you have to pay up. Gifx works well and has decent animations, but most of its potential is hiding behind the in-app purchase. Without that, you get a few effects and the ability to essentially create movies. Gifx is really only worth your time if you splurge on unlocking everything it offers. It's available in the iPhone App Store.
GE's super-fast CT scanner could save lives, definitely makes gory GIFs
Few people enjoy having a CT scan. In a bleak hospital room, you have to lie flat on your back as a huge circular scanner shoots focused X-rays through your flesh and bones. The entire process can feel a little intimidating, which is why GE Healthcare has come up with the Revolution CT: a whisper-quiet and super-fast scanner that could make medical appointments a little quicker and less stressful for patients. The new machine, which is being trialled by the West Kendall Baptist Hospital in Florida, can capture an entire heart in a single beat, where each rotation takes just 0.28 seconds. That speed, combined with better contrast detection and noise reduction, could also reduce the doses of radiation required in each scan, potentially easing people's fears. In addition, none of these advancements should compromise the quality of the final 3D images -- to prove its point, GE Healthcare has released some kinda gross, but undeniably beautiful GIFs of people's innards.
The most exciting Apple legal story you'll read all day
In a move that is sure to send massive shockwaves through Apple Store break rooms the world over, two former Apple Store employees are throwing in the towel on their claims against the company. The duo alleges that Apple owed them some cold hard cash after they spent as long as 25 minutes waiting for their bags to be checked before departing on breaks from their Apple Store shifts. The checking of employee bags, backpacks, and any other pouch that could potentially be used to smuggle delicious iDevices and other Apple swag out of the store is a common practice, though having to wait nearly a half hour for such an inspection certainly does seem a bit out of the ordinary. We all know that feeling of leaving work after a long day, so we can certainly sympathize. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, didn't see things the same way. The court decided that the unfortunate delays weren't worthy of compensation, and tossed the case like a week-old newspaper. Plaintiffs Deal Pelle and Amanda Frlekin have declared that they won't fight the federal motion to dismiss the suit, but will continue to pursue a ruling at the state level. Apple filed its own brief on the matter, claiming that since no work is actually being done while an employee is waiting for a bag to be checked, no compensation is warranted. The company also requested that the state-level claims be dismissed.
Group Text+ and Email+: New from developer Contrast
Developer Contrast today delivered two new iOS apps to the App Store, Group Text+ (US$1.99 during launch) and Email+ ($2.99). The idea behind these new apps? In the case of Group Text+, making it fast and easy to send SMS or iMessage texts to a group of recipients. For Email+, it's all about sending emails quickly to groups with a few taps. Both apps are equally happy to be used on an iPhone or iPad. The apps look identical -- in fact, Contrast originally set out to put both functions, email and group texts, into one app. The company quickly found out that doing so added a lot of unnecessary complexity to the code and the user interface, so they split the functionality into two separate apps. Before you do anything in either app, you'll want to add contacts, which is done by giving Group Text+ and Email+ access to your Contacts. You can then pick and choose; I chose just my fellow TUAWers for testing purposes. If they have a photo associated with their contact card, it appears in a circular button in a list of contacts. Now comes the fun part! To prepare a message to send, you can start by tapping on one or more of those contact buttons to select the recipient(s). Next, attach an image if you want. Contrast did the entire world a favor by adding a GIF button that links to a number of animated GIFs from Giphy. You can, of course, add photos that you've taken. Once you've added an image, you can add text. There are preset buttons in Group Text+ for sending your current location, the contents of your clipboard, and text snippets like "Where are you?", "I'm on my way" and "I'm running late." If you want to create your own text snippets, one edit button at the top of the Group Text+ not only lets you add or delete text, but also gives you access for editing your contacts. The app is indeed fast once everything is set up -- I sent fellow TUAWer Dave Caolo my current location (right behind my desk, where I always am...) with four taps, and annoyed the team with a stream of GIFs just as quickly. One iOS 8 feature that I really like with both of these apps is that they can be used as extensions from the share sheet in other apps. This makes it drop-dead simple to send a group or several individuals in your contact list a Safari URL, for example. Both apps, which will be available as an app bundle for $3.99 in the near future, make sending out messages to groups fast and easy. You can choose Email+ if you'd like to avoid sending texts, Group Text+ if that's the way you roll, or both for whatever suits the occasion. Contrast, which also produces apps like Launch Center Pro and Perfect Weather, continues to lead the way in terms of easy-to-use app user interfaces.
Capture your personal sports highlights with Fancred
Recently we have seen a growing number of sports related apps that provide an opportunity to connect with other fans of your favorite teams or to engage in a distribution of photos, gifs, and comments about games and teams more than they provide stats, scores, or background on upcoming games. Fancred is another app along those same lines. It is a free universal app that requires iOS 7.0 or later. The push from the developers for the app is that it is the perfect app to capture your own personal sports moments such as a selfie at the game, or a photo highlight, or anything tied to the event you are attending. That is easy to do and works well. In fact the entire app is easy to navigate and even for someone like me who shuns social media outlets, I figured it out pretty quickly. First you need to set up a profile with the usual information, name, email, and password. Then you select your favorite team or sport. Once that is accomplished you will start receiving a separate feed for each of your favorites. In that feed you will receive comments and gifs from other fans of that team or sport. Some provide new information while others are personal opinions on the team, its players, it performance, or the outcome of a game. I set up four teams and did get some input in the feed that I found useful. You also will get a general news feed that includes the same types of items, gifs, photos, and comments, but covering sports in general. So you may see a posting about the Lakers and Kobe Bryant, or Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, or Maria Sharapova swing changes. Some of these postings are complete articles.. The ones I saw were all features rather than hard news. In both feeds it is easy to share any of the postings with others through Facebook and Twitter. The "cred" part of the app is in a feature called Fancred Score. Each user has their own score ranking from 1, the lowest, to 100. Users increase their Fancred Score each time they post to the app or interact in some way with other users. So if you want to max out, get in there and start sharing. As I indicated earlier, I am not a social media user so Fancred doesn't hold much appeal for me. However, I am positive a lot of you regularly use social media to stay in touch with friends and family every day so this app would work well for you. Now instead of connecting with your friends and family members you can be building a new family of Patriot fans, or Blues fans, or fans of any of the more than 2700 teams included in Fancred. Happy sharing!
Netflix's new ad boards react to the weather with GIFs
To promote its recent launch in France, Netflix hired Ogilvy Paris to create an advertising campaign with a difference. The agency installed digital posters that change their content to match the context of their surroundings. GIFs from Netflix's content library in the country, such as Orange is the New Black, Breaking Bad and Fargo, are used to convey a range of emotions based on major current events, such as a sporting victory or the weather. The campaign will run through to Christmas, by which time locals will be more than used to the sight of 300's King Leonidas sheltering from the pouring rain under his shield.
Strongbad is back and he's rapping about fisheye lenses
We knew that the gang at Homestar Runner was coming back, and now that they're here it's hard not to be a little excited. In their triumphant return, Coach Z and Strongbad (pictured above) take a kind-hearted jab at '90s rap videos and their predilection for fisheye lenses. How? With a rap clip of their own, naturally. It sounds impossible, sure, but the new clip almost feels like a warm hug from the internet.
JibJab is back with a personalized GIF maker
Wise to the fact that even your mom is over animated e-cards, a denizen of an internet past is trying to reinvent itself. JibJab -- which rose to fame a a purveyor of political satire and "Starring You" video gift cards -- is today launching JibJab Messages, an iOS app that lets you personalize GIFs with your friends' faces, filters, and meme-style text.
A GIF is worth a thousand words thanks to an iOS custom keyboard
Admittedly there are some things better said with a GIF than with words. But the folks behind PopKey seem to think that everything can be said better with a short looped animation. The app is a custom keyboard for iOS 8 that swaps letters and numbers for your favorite reaction GIFs. Did your friend say something stupid? Why tell him he's an idiot with old fashioned words when Scar can do it so much better. Once it's available you'll be able to bring up PopKey simply by tapping the globe icon in the bottom of your iOS keyboard. Then you can choose from a host of hand-selected GIFs or even upload your own for a custom keyboard. You can browse your options either as images, or search by keywords like "clapping" or "facepalm." You will have to long press the image you want, then long press in the iMessage window to paste your GIF of choice, but it's definitely a lot quicker then firing up Safari, doing a Google image search, finding what you want, copying that, then opening your text message to reply. Sadly (or thankfully, depending on your perspective) there's no word on when PopKey will launch just yet, but you can sign up to be notified at the website.
Crush Tiny Titan's spirits in Madden 15 challenge
By now, you might have heard of Tiny Titan, one of the more adorable glitches to pop up recently in the Madden NFL series. The little sprout of a linebacker has the heart of a champion, but also has troubles fielding kick-offs and tackling runners. Rather than ignore the glitch entirely, EA Sports opted to turn Tiny Titan into a Madden Ultimate Team solo challenge in Madden 15. Those that log in to the card-collecting, team-building mode this weekend can play against a special Browns squad on rookie difficulty with the miniature phenom leading the defense. We'd say he bites on play action passes, but it's really more of a nibble. Beating the challenge gives players a Tiny Titan collectible item that can be sold for 1,000 coins, if you don't have any kindness left in your soul. [Image: EA Sports]
Google and EA animate trash talk with the Madden 'GIFERATOR'
The NFL regular season kicks off tonight, and to make sure you're properly amped for the week's action, EA has teamed up with Google for some GIF-based smack talk. The Madden GIFERATOR allows you to pick your favorite team, a star player, their environment, add some text and the software does the rest. From there, sharing is a breeze, and you can peruse creations for any franchise or by schedule from week to week. If you're itchin' to give it a go, you can do just that right here.
Double fumbles, Kaepernicking and Manningfaces in Madden 15
We're just one day away from the launch of Madden NFL 15. Normally that means you'd have some splashy launch trailer or crazy commercial starring comedians to watch. Not today! Welcome to the modern era of video games, where your "select" buttons now read "share," and your launch trailers are now GIFs of 400-pound running backs leaping over other people. Trust us, it's better this way. Check out the double-fumble-safety that happened to us in the video after the break, as well as our gallery of totally-moving pictures of the game below. Our captions also explain some of the improvements in this year's Madden, including "overhauled" controls on defense and the football strategy drills in the Skills Trainer mode. [Image: EA Sports]
Share iconic movie quotes with Quotacle's GIF maker
We love a great idea, but when it doesn't pan out as expected, it's easy to get really bummed out. Today's poorly executed great idea is called Quotacle, a web database of hundred of movies (not a typo) that lets you pull up choice quotes and export a GIF. That all sounds great, beyond the limited library, but each clip is far longer than it needs to be, resulting in a low resolution, yet very large file that dramatically minimizes the impact of an otherwise punchy quote. We took the liberty of cleaning up the Anchorman bit seen above, which just wasn't effective at the 11 seconds you'll find on Quotacle. Still, the site's a decent resource for pulling up random flicks, and you can download an MP4 version instead and handle the GIF building on your own.
Gifit puts a library of GIFs in your pocket without taking up space
GIFs, the animated images you see every day on the internet, have become their own odd form of communication online. A quick sweep through the comments section of most websites will show you a sea of Beyonce eye rolls, Sponge Bob appropriation, and dancing penguins used to express emotions or ideas. The problem with using GIFs, especially on the go, is either finding the one you want or storing them for later use. Thankfully, there's now an app for that. Gifit is a free and easy to use iOS app that allows you to search a massive online database of GIF animations from a stunning range of classifications. Here's just a sampling of the available GIF categories: Eye Roll, Yes, No, Laughing, Sad, Happy, Confused, Drunk, Dancing, Hair Flip, Yawn, Slow Clap, Awesome, Thank You. In total there are 48 categories to choose from, each with pages and pages of animated chaos for you to choose from. Once you've found what you're looking for, the GIF is included in a recently-used folder in-app for your everyday use. GIF images can also be saved directly to your phone so you can send your significant other this adorable moment from My Girl whenever you want. It would be easy to get lost in the app and never find the specific gif that you best feel describes your mood at a given moment if it wasn't for Gifit's powerful search features. You can search for specific GIFs by TV shows, celebrity names, kinds of animals, characters, or whatever other qualifications you can think of. Since none of the GIFs are stored directly on your phone unless you manually save them, the app itself can offer a massive image library without taking up much storage. If you're on the move, this search feature comes in incredibly handy as navigating the app on a mobile connection can be slow, not to mention resource heavy. Remember you're basically loading pages and pages of moving, high quality images. In just a few minutes of us,e I was able to eat up 4MB of my cellular data plan. If you're a heavy texter, consider doing most of your browsing on a WiFi connection and then saving favorite images directly to your phone. In the long run, you may be able to save yourself from overages on your plan. Gifit is an obvious choice for GIF fans on the go. Sometimes the only way to express yourself is with a scene from 30 Rock, and with Gifit you'll never be wanting for an image again. The app is currently free to download and there are no in-app purchases to get in your way. There's a small advertising bar at the top, but it never gets in the way of the experience. If GIFs are a part of your everyday life there's really only one response to Gifit. And that's, Gifit can be downloaded from iTunes right here.
Feedback Loop: Amazon's new phone, trust issues with password managers and more!
Do you need a break from watching the World Cup? Good! Because the latest Feedback Loop is right here. Amazon released a new phone this week and we discuss if it meets our expectations; we speculate on what makes password-management apps trustworthy; Kris shares her thoughts on a new startup that aims to disrupt coin machines; we share our favorite browser extensions that protect our most personal data; and we get ridiculously excited about Twitter's support for animated GIFs. You can find all that and more below!
Twitter now lets you share gifs on the web, Android and iPhone
And there was much rejoicing.
"Apple is looking old and stale"
In my post-Apple-WWDC-keynote haze, I did what I usually do after a big Apple event: I read anything and everything I could regarding the event. Analysis, rundowns, roundups, and galleries are all fair game, and to my surprise the general consensus -- even from the notoriously pessimistic Wall Street crowd -- was extremely positive. This was surprising to me not because I think the announcements were disappointing, but simply because without a handful of new physical products to show off, Apple's events are usually met with plenty of ignorant eye-rolling. I went from glowing analysis to glowing analysis thinking somehow things had changed... and then I stumbled upon this piece by Computerworld's Preston Gralla, and I knew everything was once again in balance. The following are quotes from Gralla's "WWDC shows it's Microsoft, not Apple, who's got the mojo": And [sic] has been usual in recent years, Apple's announcements were not particularly ground-breaking. It's just one more example of why Microsoft -- yes Microsoft -- has got the mojo these days, and Apple is looking old and stale. There's certainly nothing earth-shattering. Without Steve Jobs, Apple is turning into just another technology company. If you want to look for startling moves these days, you have to look to Microsoft. Well, beyond today's garden-variety announcements, it's buying Beats Music for $3 billion. Analysts are mixed whether the move is a good one, but that's almost beside the point. It should have owned streaming music, and not be playing catch-up. Instead, it's spending $3 billion to buy its way in. Will the trend of a resurgent Microsoft and a static Apple continue? There's no way to know. But right now, Microsoft's got the mojo, and Apple doesn't.
The Otto is an adorable point-and-shoot for making GIFs
It looks like a baby's first camera, but the blue and black plastic Otto camera is more than just a toy-like point-and-shoot. It's a camera made specifically with the intention of creating instant GIFs -- you know, these things? -- and it's pretty delightful. It operates a lot like Vine or Instagram video, in that you simply turn the crank (yes, really) to record. When you're done capturing silliness, you push the GIF directly to your phone over a shared WiFi network. Easy! There's a video of the Otto in action just below, as well as a pretty great GIF with Shaquille O'Neal looking sassy. Can you resist?
These Murasaki Baby gifs make Tim Burton look normal
Technically, these gifs show off the various backgrounds that Baby, the main character in Murasaki Baby, must traverse by activating their various attributes with the Vita's rear touchpad. The gray Heart of Stone background weighs down Baby's balloon; the blue Frozen Hell background freezes the balloon and bodies of water; the green Eye of Scrutiny background shrinks Baby; and the red, neutral background calms Baby down. But really, these gifs are simply a joy to watch – they're equal parts adorable and eerie. Take a look at them in the gallery below. The game itself is just as adorable and weird, as we found out in our preview last year. Murasaki Baby is due out in 2014. [Images: SCEE]
Here are some of the best reaction GIFs according to Reddit
Sometimes there's no better way to respond to a story or a comment than with an animated GIF. Specifically, a reaction GIF, which should be no stranger to anyone who's ever spent a significant amount of time in online chat rooms and internet message boards. And out of the millions of GIFs out there, a few have risen to the top. Which ones? Well, the Museum of the Moving Image has asked the Reddit community to come up with what it deems as the 37 most frequently deployed GIFs on the internet for an exhibit. After looking through the submissions, we have to admit there are definitely some familiar GIFs on here (We've seen the Homer Simpson fading into the bushes animation one too many times for example). If you want to check out the whole list, either head over to the source link or visit the museum in-person before the exhibit closes on May 15th. Meanwhile, we've decided to pair up some of our latest stories with a few from the list for a bit of fun. Check 'em out after the break.
