gif – sathyasays.com
gif
Animated GIFs the Hard Way & Using Them For Realtime text communication
· ☕ 1 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
When doing the new website for the Sublime Text 2.0 launch, instead of just screenshots, I wanted to have animations to demonstrate some of its features. Animated GIF files would have been a candidate, except for two issues: the 256 color limitation, which would have made the animations ugly, and the encoders I tried spat out huge files, at almost 1MB per-animation. Instead, I wrote a small Python script that takes a collection of PNG frames as input, and emits a single packed PNG file as output, which contains all the differences between the frames, and some JSON meta-data specifying which bits of the packed PNG file correspond to each frame.