Animated Personas? Sure!
When it comes to creating Personas for Firefox, most people don’t realize a wee little fun fact about the creation process. If you create a few different frames at the proper dimensions for both the header and the footer, you can piece them together as an aPNG (the example Persona below has a description that says animated GIF, which will work locally for testing, but only aPNGs are accepted at getpersonas.com). A handy add-on to use for the process is aPNG Edit, found at addons.mozilla.org.
Test out your creation using the “Custom Persona” preference, make sure it looks good to go, submit it to getpersonas.com, and congratulations – you’ve just made an animated skin for your browser!
To see one in action, pop on over to my gallery and see the animated cloud example I recently posted. It is a quick little example, so feel free to better me and make some amazing (stick to the subtle side, no insane blinking please) background animations for Firefox!
I await your creative responses!
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I’ve already started on a Killer Japanese Seizure Robot theme, ala http://www.starterupsteve.com/seizurebots/
Thanks for the great idea!
I personally prefer Animat
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/9820
awesome! i think i may take the dive and create a persona now that I can do some animation ;D
also… these textareas and textboxes in your comments are awesomely styled…
DOUBLE AWESOME!
Cool!
I’ll give a go.
I used Animat to create the APNGs here > http://www.accessfirefox.org/Mozilla_Holiday_Graphics.php
It has more options and I found adding frames to be easier and quicker than with aPNG Edit.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9820
I’m not sure what it is but something about this site/blog causes Firefox to dramatically slow down and respond.
I did an animated persona but didn’t upload it yet.
Not sure if it reacts the same when it’s an uploaded persona and one on your test personas.
However, when doing the test, it ran OK but when I tried to watch a video with the animated persona up, it was making the video stutter.
I may upload it just to test it out and report back what I find.
Love the idea, it’s just not ready from prime-time just yet.
I used this addon and it worked on small images 300×200.
I cant get it to work on the dimensions for the personas as it won’t allow you to choose continuous when the image is 3000×200 can you please explain in detail how to get this to work I don’t understand how the footer and header work together as one is on top and the other is below separated from the header, makes no sense to me.
Thanks Lisa
Use Gif Movie Gears to make animations as pngs easy
I made my own animation in Flash CS4, exported it as gif sequence. And used aPNG editor to make it to an animated PNG. But when I upload it on “costom persona” it works great! For like 10 seconds, until i reboot firefox, or open an old tab.. Why is that?
(I used 50 ms, and checked the “play forever” option).
Thnx!