GIF Animation Utilities
The following are just a few dedicated tools for creating animated GIF files. For a complete list, see the article “Optimizing Animated GIFs” by Andrew King, http://www.webreference.com/dev/gifanim/index.html.
- GIFmation (Mac and Windows)
This is commercial software from BoxTop Software that comes highly recommended by web developers. It features sophisticated palette-handling options and a bandwidth simulator. It also uses the efficient “frame differencing” method (discussed later in this chapter) for optimizing animations significantly better than its competition. GIFmation costs $49.95 and is available at http://www.boxtopsoft.com.
- Ulead GIF Animator 5.0 (Windows only)
Ulead’s GIF Animator features wizards for quickly and easily constructing animations, 200 levels of undo, pixel-level optimization, built-in transition and animation effects, a plug-in architecture for adding new animation modules, and support for AVI and QuickTime videos and layered Photoshop files. GIF Animator is $44.95. You can download a preview copy from http://www.ulead.com.
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