Show HN: Real time updating gif countdown with automatic time zone detection. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Real time updating gif countdown with automatic time zone detection.

gifcountdown.com

38 pointsmape16 comments

The only issue is that the gif is streaming, which means the page is never 'ready'.

Also I didn't look into it, but wouldn't bandwidth be an issue if people left these running in backgrounded tabs?

Yup! bandwidth is a major issue.

It's completely unusable given the size. In 30 seconds it streamed 120kb and it probably never stops streaming (until the countdown ends)

That will also never work in mobile safari since it doesn't play gifs until they finish downloading.

The maker replied to me in a comment below - it won't work in Mobile Safari, but now it only sends the first frame, so the page will finish loading and it won't eat up bandwidth.

The gif is set to only update for 2 minutes. That ends up being around 470KB.

If the size or "page never loading" is an issue you have the option to turn of animations when creating the countdown.

This will help us a lot at deviantART in the Community Relations team, we organise many chat events etc. for a global community and if we can embed this in our announcements that would be extremely helpful. I'll share it with the rest of the team, thank you!

Small question about your UI, why is the image link so tiny? Isn't it the main point of the page to get that link?

It might also be easier for many people to get direct image HTML instead of the URL that they'll have to figure out to use.

I am confused, what is the actual advantage of having the countdown be a gif compared to HTML+JavaScript?

For video and remote desktop there might be use for the kinds of gifs, but for a numeral countdown?

I would use such a gif in a blog post as an announcement for something. "Site will be up again at 8pm. (gif)", "Get 25% off in 1 hour (gif)"

The use case for it is things like forums, where you are limited in what you can embed.

It shows my timezone as Australia in the preview? I'm in US/Pacific time zone $ date Sun May 26 12:10:52 PDT 2013

Pretty sure it just defaults to Australia, since I also had Australia.

Bummer - iOS 6 wants to load the whole file before switching to the second frame, so this won't work there.

I added a check so now it only sends the first frame to iOS devices.

So if I wanted to count down to the release of Arrested Development I could...wait nvm.

That's genius. Nicely done!

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