July 8, 2015 — draft

'(Give the Gift of GIFs)

Audience: programmers

Animated GIFs can be really helpful for demonstrating in a small area how something actually works. Where books may require pages of explaining, you can fit a whole lot of action into a 300x80px GIF.

This post should be sprinkled with GIFS. But it’s not, sorry. This is kind of meta, so I’ll put most of it into a video.

Shortcomings

  • no audio

  • repeat is annoying

  • when many sprinkled around can bog down a page and also cause distraction

  • file sizes get big unless short and small

Alternatives

  • capture a real video

  • ascii.io

  • asiinema

  • script