My Favorite GIF App Features: Principle (OS X)

Principle is not a traditional GIF app. It is primarily an interactive prototyping tool, and creating GIFs is simply an ancillary feature for allowing users to export their Principle creations to share, in many cases, on Dribbble.

I’ve said before that any GIF creation tool worth its salt should be mindful of the user’s intended use for the GIF, and this is exactly what Principle does. My favorite feature is that Principle offers Dribbble shot sizes (1x and 2x) among the many presets available from the start of your creation experience.

Another feature that I like in Principle are the shortcuts to quickly jump from your work area to the prototype preview (⌘ +`) (only when the preview pane has been dislodged from the main work area, and the shortcut to start/stop recording (Control + v). Not only is allowing keyboard-only flow a good usability practice for desktop apps in general, but this can certainly be a boost to productivity, especially when recording multiple “takes” of your prototype to share as a GIF.

When you’ve completed recording your prototype in action, the export controls follow the same line of thought as the preset offerings, with readymade options for Dribbble shots. Although compression is hit or miss and will usually require you to take the file into Photoshop or a dedicated GIF editor to reduce the overall size of the GIF and optimize frame settings, the ease of creating GIFs to share of your prototype using Principle is simply remarkable.

It turns out GIFs are extremely useful for user experience design. In the spirit of rapid development, it allows interaction designers to explore their ideas at various levels of abstraction to communicate more effectively with the team. As far as interactions are concerned, Principle is one of the best tools to get to a minimally viable product within the minimally viable product.