iOS: Making GIFs yourself has always been a pretty involved process either made too simple to suit my desires or too complicated to be intuitive. GIF Toaster blends the best of both worlds, offering more than enough control over the GIFs you're trying to create in an interface that's simple to use and free of ads (if you pay).

iOS/Android: Are you a fan of swipe-friendly keyboards on your smartphone? Then you've probably heard of Google's Gboard, the third-party keyboard that lets you both swipe to spell as well as search the web. With the latest update, you can create GIFs from the keyboard using your smartphone camera, and send them wherever animated images go to be appreciated.

Android/iOS: Snapchat may have invented the Stories format, but it didn't take long for the rest of the internet to steal the idea. Now even Imgur, the meme haven originally created as an image-hosting service for Reddit, is offering its own take on Stories with a new feature called Snacks.

iOS/Android: Instagram is a great place to share all kinds of fun visuals -- except for your favourite GIFs. Instagram won't let you upload them. Fortunately, the Giphy app will let you do exactly that right on your smartphone.

Something I like is popular now, and that is bad. Thanks to GIF databases such as Giphy, the reaction GIF, once a careful and elaborate art form, is now a bland mass market dominated by a handful of outlet-approved celebrity faces. Today Giphy sped up the medium's slide into mediocrity by adding view counts to GIFs from "from an official Artist or Partner".

Giphy, the popular GIF-making and sharing platform, launched a new web tool last month that allows you to make GIFs right from your phone's camera -- no app download required.

Video: GIFs are fun, and if you're an artist, it's easy enough to turn your art into a short animation in Photoshop. This quick tutorial from Adobe shows you how it's done.

Android: Apps like Facebook Messenger have had built-in GIF search for a while, but now Google is adding it directly to the default keyboard in Android 7.1. It will even remember the ones you use the most.

Opinion: Futurama is clearly superior to The Simpsons. Fact: You can find all the life lessons and advice you'll ever need buried in between this show's many, many cancellations. Today, we're going to learn about life from the greatest men and women of the 31st century. Also Bender.

Giphy, one of our favourite GIF search engines, launched a new tool for Mac users today that lets you make a GIF of anything that's happening on your desktop.

So much can be said with a GIF. It can be an exaggerated reaction, a visual analogy to something said in a conversation, or simply a non sequitur to punctuate online communication. But usually it's just a funny animation.

iPhone: The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus got a neat new photo shooting feature called Live Photos, that essentially makes a stop motion-style video. However, for whatever reason, you can't export those photos in a format that's useful. Live GIF gives you that power.

UFC Women's Bantamweight champion Ronda 'Rowdy' Rousey's last fight ended in 34 seconds. The two before that ended in 16 seconds and 14 seconds respectively, one by knock out and the other by submission. The brevity and 'wow' factor of those bouts made them the perfect ingredients for animated GIFs which then spread across the internet through social media and image sharing websites like Imgur and Tumblr. But is it legal to create and share these seemingly harmless GIFs?

Mac: GIFs is a simple, free app for the Mac that lets you search for the perfect GIF at the perfect time, get a link to paste it into a chat or email, or download it to your computer. If you communicate with GIFs (and honestly, who doesn't at this point>), it saves you the effort of Googling around for the perfect one.

Mac: Animated GIFs get your point across visually without using a video. You often make animated GIFS from an existing video, but if you just want to capture your screen, GifGrabber will do the trick.

Sharing GIFs is a part of internet life these days. Imgur is making GIF sharing even better with high-quality MP4 video in its new GIFV extension.

Web: GIF YouTube is a simple webapp with a single purpose. It wants to convert YouTube videos into short GIFs, and make it easy for you to remember how to do that.

There's an animated GIF doing the rounds which sums up the plot of every episode of TV medical drama House. It's pointed and cruel and funny -- but the effect was ruined for me by a spelling mistake in one of the captions.

Your feed just became a lot noisier: Twitter now supports animated GIFs.