Animated GIFs in Android Applications.

Have you ever felt like adding a little sauce to your apps and excite your users or have you ever seen a really nice UI built by Interaction Designers and you really think it’s cool but when you start thinking of how to implement the crazy animations in code, you quickly start to tell your self “This UI is trash” just to exonerate yourself from building it…? 😏

Then,you’re thinking wrongly, don’t think code or SVG, think GIFs 😁

Yes, GIFs!

Couple of weeks ago this Interaction Design of an Order button was trending on twitter which lead to mixed reviews from developers, some felt it was an over kill and unnecessary while others felt it was cool. (What did I think of it? Read on to find out *¹)

I noticed that most people who didn't find it to be cool were either concerned with the user experience or the implementation of the Button .

Those concerned with the implementation were mostly thinking about creating the animations and effects in code,Meanwhile a simple GIF could do the trick,providing same effects !efficiently.

And @Zfinix1 proved it by replicating the button with two GIFs and 70 lines of code in Flutter (would be far less lines in Kotlin). Check it out here

Hello I’m GIF! (Source: Giphy.com)

GIF,JIF or GHIF? 🤔

What is a GIF?

Wikipedia: GIF which stands for Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was developed at CompuServe some 32 years ago.

But we would be talking about Animated GIF… (this is the GIF most of us are familiar with);

Animated GIFs are images encoded in graphics interchange format (GIF),which contains a number of images or frames in a single file and this frames are presented in a specific order to convey an animation. (I would refer to it as just GIF for most part of this article)

My definition: Animated GIFs are more like very short video clips in an infinite loop and without sounds (Give me an A+,I deserve it 😇)