Incredible, I literally started making a client-side gif animator like this on Wednesday. I'm kinda glad I didn't try to finish the whole thing yet, as this is very well done. I didn't know about that cool GifEncoder.
I find it annoying as well, because I use a tiling window manager, which makes opening a file manager just to drag & drop annoying - not a whole lot more, but just enough that it's not really worth it.
I don't mind having that as the default, but at least give people an option to select files the old-fashioned way, and make it easy to find within ~5 or ~10 seconds of looking at the page...
Imgur does this well, if you ask me - support for drag & drop, menu, and copy/pasting URL.
I use a tiling WM too (ratpoison), so I empathize. But you don't need to launch a file manager in order to drag and drop. You can open the image file in another browser tab, and then drag it between tabs. Hover over the destination tab for a moment to pop it forward.
Edit: It would be useful to make an addon that adds a contextual menu item for "Drop file here", which raises a file selection dialog and delivers the result to the drop zone. Essentially it would be the inverse of this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ez-drag-n-dro... I don't currently have the time to write it.
I never really thought to do that, so thanks for pointing it out. It may come in handy one day if I absolutely must use one of those services.
But in general, that's still awkward, and enough of a (mental) hassle that I probably won't bother if it's just someone who wants me to check their site out. So my advice to any web designers would be to make sure your site is functional even without the flashy add-ons, the same way you would make sure your site is functional on all browsers/operating systems.
fuzzix said it best. Long ago I configured ratpoison to be modal like vi, with tons of personal customizations. I've set it up to behave exactly like I'd want any WM to, so what's the use of moving to something newer?
I can't know that the files aren't transferred somewhere without thoroughly inspecting the source and it isn't obvious from the page that this is an offline app.
Thanks for the example. It would be great if the page itself linked to some demonstrations.
Ah, yeah, so now it's totally safe because it says so right there on the page.
The points raised in higher-up comments are still relevant... It's impossible to know for sure exactly what will happen with my images that I Drag n Drop.
Of course, for a 24 hour effort, it's great. But this is the 80/20 rule at play. The first 80% was the "easy" bit. Now you have to create some demoes, tutorials, earn user trust, etc.
I don't have a lot of need for animated GIFs personally, but this seems like a neat little tool.
No worries. I was v. disappointed when I had to fall back on flash for resizing. Felt great having client side image resize and upload (with progress) without using flash.
no FileReader support in Safari 5.1, which is used to enable the drag 'n drop image reading.
A "Nightly WebKit" build (which is basically Nightly Safari) works though.
Behind the scenes, I'm alpha-testing a new API for mapping feature detects to browsers, so you can say what features you need and get an automated response for what browsers they'll work in. (Another lazyweb project actually): https://github.com/paulirish/lazyweb-requests/issues/39
Tech: HTML5 drag n drop, FileReader, a[download], GIF encoding on the client, BlobBuilder, postMessage, <input type=range> (with Firefox polyfill), appcache, transforms, etc. Oh! and the aforementioned * { box-sizing : border-box; }