GIF Brewery 3 brings a polished animated GIF-creating experience to the Mac

GIF Brewery has long been my go to app for creating high-quality GIF animations on the Mac. It’s always been relatively easy to use, yet features powerful enough options for serious GIF-creators.

With GIF Brewery 3, several notable new features have been added to the mix, including the ability to record video directly in app via your Mac’s screen, FaceTime camera, or even iOS devices. This update turns GIF Brewery into an end-to-end solution for creating GIF animations directly from your iPhone’s screen or other media, which can be extremely handy for things like tutorials and memes.

Notable new features

• Direct screen recording from Mac, Camera, or iOS devices
• Loop preview for previewing loops prior to export
• View individual frames and save frames
• New single window UI
• 64-bit support

Of course, there are many other features included with GIF Brewery 3, as this is a major overhaul of not just the look and feel of the app, but its underpinnings as well. Notably, GIF Brewery 3 now uses Apple’s AVFoundation framework instead of QuickTime, which means that .mkv or .avi files are no longer supported. You can still use a tool like Handbrake to convert files to a supported file type (.mp4, .m4v, etc.), but this is definitely something you’ll want to keep in mind if you’re used to using codecs not currently supported by AVFoundation.

How to create GIF animations of your iPhone’s screen

One of the most popular ways to use GIF Brewery is for creating GIF animations of your iPhone’s screen. With previous versions of the app, you’d have to use a separate tool like QuickTime to capture your iPhone’s screen, and then import the resulting footage directly into GIF Brewery. With GIF Brewey 3, that is no longer the case. Watch our video walkthrough below to see how to easily create a GIF animation of your iPhone’s screen using the new end-to-end workflow.

Simplified, yet powerful

If you’ve been a longtime user of GIF Brewery, one of the most striking changes that you’ll notice is with the overall look of the app. No longer is the UI broken up into modular windows, as developer Hello Resolven Apps has opted for a new single window UI instead.

Personally, I prefer the look and feel of single window apps, especially for an app that has so many different features and components. Multiple windows certainly have their advantages, but single window UIs feel cleaner and are not as overwhelming for new users.

But don’t be fooled by the simplified look of the UI. New features like Loop Previews — which allow you to preview what a final looped GIF animation will look like upon export — and new frame management — which lets you view and save individual frames — make the app even more powerful than before.

All of the tools that are needed to create quick tutorial animations, memes, and virtually anything else you’d use an animation for, are here. There are a lot of options available on the Mac, but if you’re solely focused on creating GIF animations, then GIF Brewery 3 is the very best there is.

Remarkably, Hello Resolven Apps is giving away GIF Brewery 3 for free until March 12th. Thereafter, it’ll rise in price to $0.99 before resting at its final selling price of $4.99. In other words, you should definitely head over to the Mac App Store right now and download GIF Brewery 3.