[X-Apps] How to make animated gifs?

[hart at nasw.org]

You might want to consider whether an animated gif is actually a good 
thing. IMO, one or a few playthroughs might be interesting. A looped 
gif on a page is distracting to the eye, and can become downright 
annoying. Looped animated gifs are also rather dated, like the pages 
with little guys digging to show the page is under construction.

That's not to say you can't have some fun without annoying your 
visitors. I'm no expert, just a tinkerer, but here are three examples.

Animated gif that plays just a couple of times. In fact you have to be 
quick to catch it. This is just for fun and the idea was to show a 
little cute or silly thing that someone who sees it might laugh at. If 
it looped, it would be really annoying.  Look at Groucho on the lower 
right: <http://www.olympus.net/personal/hart/>. On some pages, cute or 
silly is not what you want.

Here's a simple three-state rollover, again just for fun. Easier to 
make than an animated gif. Glide your mouse over the guy with the movie 
clacker, then click. I just built the frames in Photoshop from two 
originals. (The third frame doesn't seem to show for some reason, at 
least in Safari. It works as designed in IE. I'll have to look into 
that.) <http://tintin.eugraph.com/tqsect/feature/featoc.html>

And here's a QuickTime movie similar to what you describe. I assembled 
this frame by frame using Photoshop to cut pieces out of a single TIFF, 
then imported as a movie in QuickTime. 
<http://acp.eugraph.com/birds/sing.html>.


On Monday, May 12, 2003, at 06:01  AM, X-Applications wrote:

> Dave, thanks for all your input and insights.  Perhaps I should have
> said this before, but this is what I'm trying to accomplish.  I plotted
> a several graphs in gnuplot that show the evolution of a wave pulse as
> time progresses (one plot for each increment in time).  I can save each
> plot as a .png and I can use QuickTime Pro to create a nice movie of
> the wave pulse's evolution; however, I would like to create an animated
> logo for a Web page and thought that an animated .gif would be the way
> to go.  What would you suggest?  Small bandwidth and not requiring a
> reader to have any special plug-in would be plusses.  (I don't have
> Photoshop, but I do have the Gimp.)  Thanks again.
>
> ---John.

Stephen Hart
http://eugraph.com