“Smileys” have been around in one form or another for a surprisingly long time.
Posted in Productivity, Skype Tagged Edge, Edge browser, IE, Outlook, Random Stuff, skype, Skype for business Tip o’ the Week 391 – Smile, control your emoticons Read what Thurrot has to say about the other bits of the beta. The “expressions” feature lumps emojis & GIFs together to make it simpler to annoy your recipients. Just make sure the content is suitably Safe For Work or you may find the consequences of sending jokey GIFs to be less than ideal.įacebook has the same kind of thing on comments boxes, from a variety of s ources and also not entirely SFW.įinally, has unveiled a new beta mode that is available for some users (& rolling out to more – look for a “Try the beta” toggle switch on the top of your Hotmail/MSN/ mailbox) – and one feature will be animations that can be easily embedded in mail. Try pepping up boring Yammer groups or Teams sites, by looking for the GIF logo on the message box, then searching for a 2-3 second loop that underlines your point. Skype (the consumer version) added some featured videos (with sound), but both Yammer and Teams have added GIF buttons to make it easy to seach for amusement from online animation repository, GIPHY. If you have an email in Outlook that you know has animated GIFs, look for the Actions submenu on the Message tab and select View in Browser.Īdding animated GIFs to chat applications is a good way of making a point more vociferously than with smilies… though it can be even more distracting.
GIF APP FOR SKYPE SERIES
This is a series of frames which are played like a simple video – with low frame rates & no sound, yet they have occupied a niche in the way people use the web.Īpplications tend not to render animated GIFs well – Outlook, for example, simply inserts a static image, but browsers do show them properly. Most people, however, will be familiar with GIFs due to a sub-variant – the Animated GIF.
GIFs were relatively poor quality – only 256 colours could be used 30 years ago, that wasn’t an issue but in recent decades, it’s more limiting. One long-used file type goes back to 1987, the GIF – standing for Graphics Interchange Format, predating the eventually prevalent JPEG format by 5 years. PPT will always be PowerPoint – though that app has gained notoriety in such phrases as “ Death by PowerPoint” (which we’ve all been subjected to, even if not completely fatal), or “ PowerPoint Karaoke” (reading out the words on slides without adding anything). TXT, have been around for so long and are so cross-platform, they transcend association with any one application, whereas. We’re all used to file formats being associated with programs and the data they work with. Posted in Skype, Teams Tagged skype, Teams Tip o’ the Week 392 – distract with GIFs Expect Teams for Consumer, due to arrive later this year, to have tighter integration – and perhaps may eventually replace Skype. Teams and Skype have started interoperating more, too, though it’s a limited experience at the moment. Skype still has a huge user base, with over 40 million daily users of late. It’s getting easier to schedule and join Skype video meetings, too – from within the Skype app or even in a browser, you can Meet Now and quickly generate a URL that can be shared with others, who can join as a guest without needing to have an account or signing in. Custom Backgrounds will be rolled out very soon, so users can replace their messy kitchen backdrop with a scene of serenity. Microsoft Teams has announced some feature updates too – though there’s still more to do.
Online conferencing app Zoom has seen huge take-up over recent weeks, though its security has been questioned & tested by Zoom Bombing, leading the company to quickly release updates to give more control. Allez!Ĭaptain Slow is hosting an online pub quiz and there are plenty of others you can join or even run your own quiz offline. When you’re only allowed one walk a day and you can’t go for a drive, turn to virtual tours and motoring videos instead. As the developed world stays in and starts to go a bit stir crazy, life beginning to feel like an episode of Big Brutha, we’re increasingly turning to streaming and video conferencing apps typically used for business, to keep in touch with friends and family, go dating, virtually visit a museum and many other things.