Campaign to add language agnostic animated gifs to each FC command page on the wiki (+ possibly as tooltips within FC)

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NormandC
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Re: Campaign to add language agnostic animated gifs to each FC command page on the wiki (+ possibly as tooltips within F

Post by NormandC »

Just a friendly reminder that there was no consensus on the matter of adding animated GIF to the wiki. Quite a few people happen to think that it would be extremely annoying. I'm on the fence myself. I think animations would be more widely accepted only if they weren't automatically looped or activated. In other words, I think they would be OK if they had a play/pause button. Which kind of disqualifies GIFs, actually.

As for tooltips within FC, I just came upon this Fusion 360 video that shows tooltips with static images. You can see that an animation is not absolutely necessary to convey the purpose of a tool.

phpBB [video]
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Re: Campaign to add language agnostic animated gifs to each FC command page on the wiki (+ possibly as tooltips within F

Post by chrisb »

I am one of those who are frequently annoyed by animated gifs. This has different reasons: One is that they distract me, if I want to read the text around; a second is that I don't know where they start, so I have to watch them several times (perhaps that is the reason why the usually loop endlessly); a third is, that I cannot stop them or show them in slow motion if I want to see a certain detail.

While the endless loop can be controlled by a property which tells the gif to stop after a certain number of loops, it is not possible to restart them, a reload of the whole page is necessary to do so.
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NormandC
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Re: Campaign to add language agnostic animated gifs to each FC command page on the wiki (+ possibly as tooltips within F

Post by NormandC »

Which is why maybe small short videos (in webm format for example) may be more suited. Of course, a plugin to watch embedded videos may be needed. But Wikipedia already does it, and it has the same wiki engine as ours.

It's a little like the Youtube video I embedded above. It's static by default. You want to watch it, you click on it. Otherwise, it does not distract from reading the rest of the page.

They may even be hosted somewhere else... Github maybe?
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Re: Campaign to add language agnostic animated gifs to each FC command page on the wiki (+ possibly as tooltips within F

Post by Kunda1 »

Sorry to hear that you think they are annoying, I find them very informative if they are done well and rhoughtful. Btw, If you right click on a gif on most modern browsers, you will see an option to 'show controls' which allows the user to control what part of he gif they want to watch or slow down.
I was thinking more in the lines of SketchUp, when you first install SketchUp if you hover over the command an animation pops up showing you the capabilities of said button/function.if you're a poweruser, it's possible to simply disable the feature.
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Re: Campaign to add language agnostic animated gifs to each FC command page on the wiki (+ possibly as tooltips within F

Post by chrisb »

Kunda1 wrote: Sun Jul 15, 2018 2:02 am Sorry to hear that you think they are annoying,
I dont want to split hairs here, but I wanted to express rather how I perceive them. And I left myself a loophole by saying frequently instead of always. I envisioned FreeCAD wiki pages where all the images where moving at the same time while I was trying to read the text :cry:
I find them very informative if they are done well and rhoughtful.
You are right, those animations exist, and I have seen them here in the forum as well - it was something with assembly and moving parts. The problem is perhaps that they are sometimes misused and often try to show more complicated things suitable for a video but not for a gif.
Btw, If you right click on a gif on most modern browsers, you will see an option to 'show controls' which allows the user to control what part of he gif they want to watch or slow down.
Rightclick in my firefox didn't show this, but I could install it as background image :roll:
I was thinking more in the lines of SketchUp, when you first install SketchUp if you hover over the command an animation pops up showing you the capabilities of said button/function.
That could well be very helpful.

Please note that this post contains animated gifs :lol: .
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NormandC
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Re: Campaign to add language agnostic animated gifs to each FC command page on the wiki (+ possibly as tooltips within F

Post by NormandC »

Kunda1 wrote: Sun Jul 15, 2018 2:02 am Btw, If you right click on a gif on most modern browsers, you will see an option to 'show controls'
And what would those "modern browsers" be? Firefox user here as well, there's no such thing. Chromium doesn't have controls either. Maybe they are not "modern" enough? :|

BTW I found that Peek, which I've been using to generate animated GIFs, can also save to APNG (Animated PNG). APNG is much nicer (GIF only has a 256-color palette) and make files half the size. Unfortunately, APNG was never officially accepted in the PNG standard, and only Firefox supports it. :(

Peek also saves to webm which generates files with a smaller footprint than GIFs, but the forum can only attach them as files, not display them; and on Windows, Internet Explorer (that $%?&*! that plenty of Windows users continue to use) can't view webm video natively. :roll:
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Re: Campaign to add language agnostic animated gifs to each FC command page on the wiki (+ possibly as tooltips within F

Post by Opus »

NormandC wrote: Sat Jul 14, 2018 11:08 pm As for tooltips within FC, I just came upon this Fusion 360 video that shows tooltips with static images. You can see that an animation is not absolutely necessary to convey the purpose of a tool.
Nice example ! I vote for it! Better than animated gifs.

Is it possible to have this kind of extended tooltips in FC?
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Re: Campaign to add language agnostic animated gifs to each FC command page on the wiki (+ possibly as tooltips within F

Post by NormandC »

One possible vote down for animated GIF, and it seems to me a rather critical reason:

Krita Manual Contribution Guide wrote:Avoid using gifs (open for debate)
The reason is that people with epilepsy may be affected by fast moving images.
https://docs.krita.org/en/contributors_ ... al-writing (thanks to Opus for the link)

Admittedly this is the first time I read this argument, might be useful to research this.
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Re: Campaign to add language agnostic animated gifs to each FC command page on the wiki (+ possibly as tooltips within F

Post by Jee-Bee »

NormandC wrote: Thu Jul 19, 2018 2:02 pm Admittedly this is the first time I read this argument, might be useful to research this.
simple test: add banned pokemon scene in gif
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