GIF speak

If an image is worth a thousand words than an animated gif must at least be worth a large novel. You can’t really deny that an animated gif does potentially carry a significant amount of semantic value if used properly. There is a small trend where people are making animated gifs to communicate something that would have take an inordinate amount of text.

“Animated GIFs are great for demonstrating UI actions within applications, like how to open a file in Microsoft Word. They are also great for visualizing UI actions like hover states, clicks, keystrokes, and others that can’t be portrayed very well with a single static image.” - Chris Bracco

“They load quickly, work across devices and you don’t have to hit play to watch the screencast.” - Amit Agarwal

I give you three examples:

A Better Twitter Bookmarklet for Sending Tweets

Quickly view Google Cache version of any webpage

Using Gifs in GitHub

So what would something like a gif-enriched documentation look like? I think you wil be pleasently suprised. Gif enriched documentation

Great tutorial on converting screencasts into animated GIFs on Mac OSX