Gnome is a deceptively clever animated GIF app by Lex Friedman:
The truest thing about animated GIFs is that they are a critical
pillar of modern human communication, and yet getting one into a
Slack message or an iMessage thread or an email reply usually
requires opening a browser, navigating to a website, searching,
right-clicking, copying, switching back, pasting, and apologizing
for the delay. By then the moment has passed, and the joke is
dead, and what was the point of any of this, really?Gnome lives in your Mac’s menubar. You hit a keyboard shortcut. A
little search window appears. You type what you’re looking for — weird al, shrug, nailed it, that’s a paddlin’ — and a
grid of GIFs appears. Click the one you want. It’s now on your
clipboard. Paste it wherever you were typing. Joke saved. World
improved.That’s really the whole app. It does exactly that, and it gets
out of the way. No account. No sign-in. No newsletter. Just
GIFs, faster.
When Friedman launched Gnome last month, it was Mac-only. Since then he’s already added an iOS version, and they sync/coordinate nicely. And if you have a local folder of GIFs, you can connect that to Gnome and it’ll show results from your personal curated library before those from Gnome’s online partner Klipy. You share the same local library on Mac and iOS, provided you choose a folder in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or similar. The iOS version of Gnome offers an extension for Apple’s Messages app and an optional system-wide keyboard. On the Mac, you can disable the menu bar icon and just run Gnome like a regular app (if, like me, the last thing you need is another status icon in your menu bar).
It’s a really simple app with a deceptive amount of craft and attention to detail. I can’t say I send all that many animated GIFs, but Gnome is so nice it makes me want to send more. I dig it. $7 one-time payment on the web, or $8 in the App Store, and if you buy it on the web you can unlock it on iOS, and vice-versa.
