Make a fun looping animation that's perfect for Facebook or Twitter

Animated GIFs are a great way to share short, funny clips on social media – they work in any app or web browser, on any device, and are easy for other people to save and reuse.

The format originally rose to prominence on short-form blogging site Tumblr, but is also ideal for Facebook and Twitter. The best examples can convey a huge amount of information in just a few silent seconds.
If you have a video clip that would make a good GIF, VideoPad Free Video Editor is the perfect tool for optimizing and converting it. Here's how to do it.

1. Import and trim your clip

Download and install VideoPad Video Editor, then start the program and select ‘Open project’. Choose the video you want to turn into an animated GIF and click ‘Open’. Drag the clip into the Timeline window at the bottom of the screen.

Scrub back and forth through the video by clicking and dragging the red marker on the timeline. Once you’ve found the part you want to convert, click on the beginning of the clip and drag it to the right to select the start point, then click and drag the end of the clip to the left to select the end point.

Click the Play button under the Sequence Preview to see how it looks, then adjust the start and end points if necessary. None of the changes you make are permanent at this point

2. Apply effects and optimize

If you like, you can add special effects to your clip before converting it. There’s an excellent selection of artistic and fun filters available under ‘Video effects’, so spend some time experimenting with these. The ‘Change clip speed’ option can also be useful for creating fun GIFs (you can ignore any settings related to audio).

Once you’re happy with your clip, select ‘Export > Video File’ and choose GIF from the drop-down list. Now pick a resolution; social media scheduling tool Buffer recommends 1200x628 pixels for Facebook and 1024x512 pixels for Twitter, so pick ‘Custom’ and enter the appropriate dimensions.

You also need to set a frame rate; 15 frame per second (fps) is usually suitable for a GIF, so select this and check ‘Constant frame rate’. Click ‘Encoder settings’ and select ‘Looping’ so your GIF doesn’t just play once and then stop.


3. Save and share

When you’re done, click ‘Create’. If you receive a warning that the preview and export aspect ratios don’t match, select ‘Crop edges’ – resizing the video to fit will distort it. It’ll take a few moments for your video to be converted. Once it’s done, you can open it in Microsoft Photos to see how it looks, then share it on your preferred social media platform. If you’d like to make a GIF using a section of a video from YouTube, check out our guide to the best free YouTube downloaders

http://www.afriteche.com/2017/02/how-to-turn-any-video-into-animated-gif.html

Nokia will re-launch the 3310, perhaps the best-loved and most resilient phone in history


The phone, originally released in 2000 and in many ways beginning the modern age of mobiles, will be sold as a way of getting lots of battery life in a nearly indestructible body.

The new incarnation of the old 3310 will be sold for just €59. (23.500 Naira) and so likely be pitched as a reliable second phone to people who fondly remember it the first time around. It will be revealed at Mobile World Congress later this month, according to leaker Evan Blass who first revealed the details.

It's still possible to buy the 3310 on Amazon, though only through its marketplace and not directly from the company itself. The Amazon listing describes a range of features, including a clock, calculator, the ability to store up to ten reminders and four games: Snake II, Pairs II, Space Impact, and Bantumi.

Snake was so well-loved that it's currently available for iPhone, Android and Windows phone users to download.



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The Nokia 3310 is coming back: Here's how to play Snake right now
That collection of features has led to it being branded as perhaps the most resilient and long-lasting phone ever made. The reputation has let it become the star of hundreds of memes, and even led people to crush it in a hydraulic press.

Nokia struggled to bring its brand into the smartphone era and ended up being sold to Microsoft. But since then it has targeted success by making new versions of old phones, including the Nokia 215, which costs $29 and lasts for 29 days.

Phones made under the Nokia brand are now sold by HMD Global, a Finnish company that bought the rights to the name. HMD will reveal other new mobiles – the Nokia 3, 5 and 6 – at the same MWC event.

Those other new phones wll be more like smartphones, but will retain much of the same low price.

http://www.afriteche.com/2017/02/nokia-3310-to-makes-comeback-after.html

Telegram now has a blogging platform to go along with its popular messaging app. It’s called Telegraph and, according to VentureBeat, offers fast publishing and anonymous posting — without requiring you to register an account or sign in through social media.

The app’s user interface looks very similar to Medium and allows for easy embeds. You can also embed images from your computer by clicking on the camera button. In comparison to Medium, the loading time for embeds is relatively fast. Publication is instantaneous upon hitting “publish.” Posts are shareable on social media platforms but are designed to work best on Telegram’s new Instant View layout, which works similarly to Facebook’s Instant Articles feature.

The simplicity and speed of Telegraph are not without its downsides. As TechCrunch points out, the lack of user history means that if you accidentally delete the link to your published post, it would be very difficult to track down unless you have cookies enabled on your browser. The anonymous nature also opens up opportunities for abuse, potentially paving the way for internet trolls and spreaders of fake news — a problem that has put tech giants like Facebook and Google under scrutiny.

Telegram’s user base has grown significantly since its inception, though it continues to lag behind WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. In February this year, founder Pavel Durov announced that the company hit 100 million active users.

The introduction of Telegraph continues Telegram’s expansion beyond just messaging. The company recently added games, and in a blog post, it teased “Something big is brewing in our secret dungeons. Stay tuned.”

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