Two things on one site
Diffreel is a playground: a 720 × 1280 stage, a row of beats, and a toolbox of pieces you drag onto it. You arrange the pieces across the beats, press save, and you have a short animated explainer — a comparison, a walkthrough, a set of numbers that move.
The reels already on this site, at /reels, are the blog: finished explainers with an article under each one. They are what the playground makes. Anyone can watch them without an account.
| If you want to… | Go to | Account needed |
|---|---|---|
| Watch a finished reel and read the article | /reels | No |
| Draw a reel of your own | /playground/new | Yes — free |
| See the reels you have drawn | /your-reels | Yes |
| Change your plan, password or sessions | /account | Yes |
What a reel is
A reel is a short vertical animation made of beats. A beat is one screen the reel holds before moving on — a few seconds each, five or six of them in a typical reel, running about 30 to 80 seconds end to end, then looping.
Every beat draws from the same pool of pieces. A circle you place in beat 3 can appear again in beat 5, in a different position or a different colour, and the reel animates the difference. That is the whole idea: you describe the pieces once and say which beats show them.
How to read this handbook
Every action that changes something carries the same block, so you never have to guess what a button will do before you press it:
Example — what these blocks tell you
- What changes
- Exactly what moves: which screen, which value, which row.
- Who sees it
- Whether it is only you, everyone who opens the reel, or nobody until you do something else.
- When to do it
- The situation the control is for — and the situations it is not for.
- How to undo it
- How to get back, in the same words the interface uses. When something genuinely cannot be undone, this row says so in red instead.
Chapters are in the order you meet them. If you have just signed up, the next two are the ones to read; everything after is reference you can come back to.