XAnimatedImage: Performant animated GIF engine for iOS (FLAnimatedImage in Swift)

Platform

XAnimatedImage is a performant animated GIF engine for iOS written in Swift based on FLAnimatedImage. An illustration is shown below:

XAnimatedImage playing multiple GIFs

Features

  • Plays multiple GIFs simultaneously with a playback speed comparable to desktop browsers
  • Honors variable frame delays
  • Eliminates delays or blocking during the first playback loop
  • Interprets the frame delays of fast GIFs the same way modern browsers do

Who is this for?

  • Apps that don’t support animated GIFs yet
  • Apps that already support animated GIFs but want a higher performance solution
  • People who want to tinker with the code (the corresponding blog post describing the original FLAnimatedImage repo is a great place to start; also see the To Do section below)

Requirements

  • iOS 7.1+
  • Xcode 7.1+

Installation

XAnimatedImage, like it’s original counterpart FLAnimatedImage, is a well encapsulated drop-in component. Simply replace your UIImageView instances with instances of XAnimatedImageView to get animated GIF support. There is no central cache or state to manage.

Manually

You can integrate XAnimatedImage into your project manually. You can do it by copying the “Classes” folder in your project (make sure that “Create groups” option is selected).

Other

Other installation methods are currently being integrated into the project. Currently, this repository supports only manual installation. Planned, future installation methods will include:

  • CocoaPods
  • Carthage

##Usage

var animatedImage = XAnimatedImage(initWithAnimatedGIFData: NSData(contentsOfURL: NSURL(fileURLWithPath: NSBundle.mainBundle().pathForResource("example", ofType: "gif")!))!)
var animatedImageView = XAnimatedImageView()
animatedImageView.animatedImage = animatedImage
animatedImageView.frame = CGRectMake(0,0,100,100)
self.view.addSubview(animatedImageView)

##To Do

  • Support other animated image formats such as APNG or WebP
  • Integration into network libraries and image caches
  • Investigate whether FLAnimatedImage should become a UIImage subclass
  • Smarter buffering
  • Investigate the usage of GPUImage for less CPU intensive image processing.
  • Support CocoaPods and Carthage for installation methods.

##Contributions

This project owes most in part to the original FLAnimatedImage contributors namely Raphael Schaad (github | @raphaelschaad).

If there any issues to be directed at me, you can reach me, Khaled Taha, @iamktothed.

GitHub

https://github.com/khaledmtaha/XAnimatedImage