I was playing around with an app called 'Gif Brewery', which converts video into Animated gifs... And thought "Why not try this in a mobile app". Animated gifs won't work in a UIView, but they will work just fine in a UIWebView... So I promptly modified Chris' "Side Menu" plugin, although It can work on a lot of different screens... I added this *before* the tableView code in the 'viewDidLoad' method: UIWebView *myWebView = [[UIWebView alloc]initWithFrame:self.view.frame]; NSString *filePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"beachscene" ofType:@"gif"]; NSData *gif = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:filePath]; [myWebView loadData:gif MIMEType:@"image/gif" textEncodingName:nil baseURL:nil]; myWebView.userInteractionEnabled = NO; [self.view addSubview:myWebView]; And although it will need some tweaking and cleaning up, this is the result: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/115208762/ani_app.mov I think this has a bit of potential to really 'wow' a client, if done correctly. 'Gif Brewery' is $5 on the Mac App store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gif-brewery/id435989461?mt=12 I'm not promoting them, and there may be dozens of similar programs available. I'm just pointing out the tools I used to create this. Cheers! -- Smug

Killer! Love it.

Very nice. And it will make a good first impression (you know, the first 7 seconds are important...). Thanks for sharing Thomas

That is wicked cool. Awesome work, Thanks for sharing!

I like it too. Thanks Smug.

Nice!!!

Pretty cool Smug!

Whoa! That is pretty darn cool!

Very slick!!! Thanks a lot for the share Smug!

Nice!!thank you

Nice, How well does it work on different size device screens. Any resolution lost. Have you tested it on a device or just the emulator?

Great! Thanks, Smug, I have to try this! Er... Wouldn't it work with a video file instead of a gif? Wouldn't it be smoother? Cheers Jack

Jack, probably, but depending on the video, the size might be a bit too big to include in the app, whereas a animated gif can be much smaller in filesize. And I 'could' increase the frame rate, I was just fooling around with defaults to see if it was viable. :) Cheers! -- Smug

I found some online tools that make 5 second clips for free, so I made one. I'm definately going to try dropping this code into a plugin and see what happens. Just as an idea, how easy would it be to set the the url of an animated gif as the background image value in the control panel for a plugin? Alan

Well, if you were to use the standard 'background image' property in BT, it shouldn't be too hard... In your plugin, I'd do an 'if' statement to detect if the image is a gif file, if so, create an instance of the webView, otherwise, go with the UIImageView... Maybe a slightly more complex 'if' statement to gleen between large and small devices... But completely doable... Cheers! -- Smug

Nice Smug! The animated gif looks like it can autoplay- which was a limitation I had run into before with testing out an approach using video player. Would it be possible to play over only a portion of the screen if you had smaller dimension gif? (If not could areas of the gif use transparency for clear) Thanks

I suspect 'in theory' that could work, but you'd have to be a graphic wiz to get all the seams just right, or custom make things for each device size... Not sure what the best approach would be... But again, the 'theory' of setting a UIView/UIWebView combo to use 1 'static' gif and another animated gif should work... I probably won't be testing that however; it's not my requirements for the moment... I'm just updating a friends app and thought this would be a cool effect to have on the home screen... Cheers! -- Smug

Now this is interesting... I was having a bit of an issue getting the same animated gif to look decent across the multiple device sizes now available in iOS... The webView worked nice, but sometimes it wouldn't scale 'just right' depending on the aspect ratio of the device versus the aspect ratio of the gif... I found this project on github (of course, lol!): https://github.com/mayoff/uiimage-from-animated-gif which as the title implies, allows the use of an animated gif in a UIImageView From there, I was able to set the 'content mode' of the imageView to allow the gif to stretch a little, or compress a little, depending on the device used. A Vast improvement. Add that "UIImage+animatedGIF" class to your project and this code works dandy: NSURL *url = [[NSBundle mainBundle] URLForResource:@"beachani" withExtension:@"gif"]; UIImageView *gifImage = [[UIImageView alloc]initWithImage:[UIImage animatedImageWithAnimatedGIFData:[NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:url]]]; [gifImage setFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, screenBounds.size.width, screenBounds.size.height)]; gifImage.contentMode = UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFill; [self.view addSubview:gifImage]; @NCBuzz: This method might be a better way of using a static/animated image, because then you could control the aspect ratio of all images, therefore allowing easier 'seaming' of the two (or more) imageViews... Cheers! -- Smug

Cool! We're heading out early for long weekend. I will give it a try next week. Thanks!

Smug in da houz!!!!!

@Smug, wouldn't you be able to just do: myWebView.scalesPageToFit = YES; to your original code, and get the same thing, without having to add the extra class / changes? Haven't tested, but assume so :-) David.

@David, actually I did that. But it scales them 'proportionately', which is nice, but not always desirable; in some devices it left gaps at the bottom trying to keep the page 'perfect'. With the imageView, it's not always 'perfect' but it fills the entire screen. Cheers! -- Smug

Ahh, gotcha! I'm playing with it now, I'll try it on a few devices. You rock, as usual!