OK, so we’ve been really busy at StudioROKIT with client work literally coming out of our ears, but we’re still here and to prove it here’s a quick post of one of those .gifs (pronounced ‘jif’ – we’ll stick with gif thanks) that you can look at forever.
It’s funny, but when Macromedia’s (and later Adobe’s) Flash® platform arrived it heralded the beginning of a new type of file format and programming that was set to rewrite the rules of the game in terms of web animation and it had wider implications.
There’s no doubt the very late 90’s and early 2000’s was an exciting time, things were suddenly possible that had seemed like pipe dreams and designers, fuelled by new and endless possibilities offered by this clever bit of software, began creating full websites entirely created in Flash®. We can remember seeing the first site that rewrote the rules of what was conceivably possible, a site by the German design and media studio DerBauer. Even now, we check back at their site to see what’s cooking.
Off the back of all this rampant (and in some cases ill conceived) digital creativity, Flash® became another ubiquitous web technology, one of the most downloaded plugins in the history of the web and it seemed that its future was set. It would become the heart and soul of the web’s creative heart. But then 2007 arrived and with it came a change.
That change was was the original iPhone from Apple and, like other disruptive technologies that had come before it, it rewrote the game, it didn’t run Flash® and it would never run Flash® as outlined in the now famous open letter from Steve Jobs to both Apple users worldwide and Adobe® in April 2010. This opened the proverbial can of worm and prompted a response from Adobe’s CEO defending their product and rebutting the points made by Steve Jobs. In short, battle lines had been drawn and an ideological fight for future web standards was being waged in public by two of the biggest tech companies around. The winner was Apple. Flash®, as many people know sucked (a technical term) and was made worse by it’s poor mobile device performance, its endless security patching and its parent company denying any issues at all with its precious golden egg laying goose. Adobe® killed off their mobile development of Flash® conceding that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. HTML5 arrived to help speed things up and it was dead and buried by 2011.
And this is where we come full circle to the 3D animated .gif that Flash® couldn’t kill. Like returning to the bicycle after we have invented the car, there’s something charming and simple about the humble .gif file. Good examples of animated ones are everywhere around the web. Many are memes that cover Facebook and other social sites like so much confetti and, against an onslaught of cutting edge technology that should have wiped them off the face of the web, like cockroaches in a post apocalyptic digital landscape they’re still here and doing rather nicely.
You might be interested in “APNGs”, animated PNGs with full alpha support: http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/08/11/1329227/new-animated-png-creation-tools-intend-to-bring-apng-into-mainstream-use