Making animated GIFs

Did you know that you can use animasci.com to make your own animated gifs? It's quite easy and doesn't even require an account. Here's how:

1. Click on "Draw an animasci"

2. Draw one or more frames

3. Click on "Save"

4. Use the link "Animated GIF" which points directly to the GIF animation of the frames you just drew. You can download the animated GIF or link to it.

Good work, Bro!

Featured Playlists

Not everything is everybody's cup of tea and not everyone likes all types of animascis. So we've come up with curated thematic portals around certain topics. Check out the first featured playlists:

Science

Things we read and thought about from the world of science and popular para-science.

 

Movies & TV Shows

Your favourite 30" short movies and scenes from TV shows that wrote history.

Human Relationships

Say it with a poem, say it with a song - or say it with an animasci.

Doodles

And sometimes we've run out of inspiration and tried something new without trying too hard to make sense.

New feature: Sharing to Chinese social platforms

Sharing animascis just got a little easier for readers on Renren and Weibo: we added two new buttons for those two social networks which are quite popular in Asia.

Let us know what you think!

Bugfixes and new features in Editor

Today we released some improvements for the animasci editor and a bugfix:

• New keyboard shortcuts: control+P and control+3 will show a preview of the animation
• control+S and control+2 will save the animation
• Fixed a minor bug that would print a javascript error when creating a new animasci. This only showed in the developer console of your browser (for those who have enabled it) and had no functional impact.

Check it out here!

Feeds: do you know them?

We are modern people and like to stay informed of many topics: world developments, politics, advances in science, cultural events and of course our daily dose of the lols. Keeping track of all these sources can be time consuming. Fortunately people had this problem before us and solved it: with feed readers.

Feed readers grab new content from web pages the moment it appears and organize it like an email inbox.

Google Reader was our favourite for a long time and it's a shame it was discontinued. But the new Feedly does just as good a job.

And now you can read your daily animascis fresh out of the oven among your other news with your favourite feed reader; just add animasci.com as a feed and it will do the rest.

RSS feeds

Since today RSS feeds are available. Point your favourite RSS reader to http://animasci.com/feeds/index.rss or visit the home page and click on the orange RSS icon at the bottom of the page.

Pin it on Pinterest

You can pin animascis now on Pinterest plain and simple. When sharing, you will be asked on which board you want to pin the animation to.

Happy pinning!

New Features: Animated GIFs, Playlists and Sharing on Google+ and Facebook

Just a quick note on some new features:

Animated GIFs

Animations can be served as animated GIFs now. Check the play page for an animation for the link. They still look a little crude but we're working on improving them. Please note that varying frame durations wildly will lead to large GIF files.

Playlists

Logged in users can create their own playlists. Playlists are still private; only people who know the URL to a playlist can view them. All your own playlists are visible under the "My Playlists" link.

Sharing on social media platforms

The famous like and share buttons have arrived! You can share any animasci  on Facebook and Google+ from the play page.

Aniwhat?!

You know Ragecomics, Failblog, 9gag and 4chan which are all popular entertainment sites which host funny and sometimes philosophical pictures and short stories contributed by the sites' visitors. In our information-overladen times they make a nice difference: no long introductions, no complicated plots, no sign-in, no click orgies. A picture, a laugh, so simple.

One could take many of these stories and make short video clips out of them, but currently videos have a few issues: they are large, require a long time to download, they don't run easily on all platforms and require plugins. And most importantly: someone has to make them which is an entirely different magnitude of effort than drawing a simple comic strip.

Animasci is a site for animated stories created by anyone which use pictures composed out of letters and symbols available on the keyboard. You possibly use many of those already to express emotions in text, like :) or :P

An entire ecosystem of emoticons has evolved around expressing objects, scenes and emotions with a pictogram; Animasci is simply the next logical step to join a sequence of emoticons together into a movie.

From a technical standpoint animasci is compelling: it works in any browser, has very low hardware requirements and videos display instantly even on mobile phones as they are typically smaller than 1kb.