It hasn't been long since the last update to Gif Animator and although I don't want to make a habit of cluttering the product blog with boring release notifications I'll probably make an exception for releases with interesting new features or important bug fixes. Both of which I think this update qualifies for! This update offers various UI tweaks and enhancements, some performance improvements, the odd new tool and quite a few bug fixes.
You can view a full list of changes here, a condensed summary is available below, and you can download from the usual place.
What's New
- A new tool for selecting frame transparency
- The ability to resize frames and animations, or to crop large images when importing them into an animation
- Better/faster rendering of thumbnails and animation previews
- New options for controlling thumbnails
- Improved Clipboard support
- UI teaks
What's Fixed
- Fixed some issues with displaying squares or smudges instead of the … character
- Fixed a couple of different issues with looping support for animations
- Fixed various issues when importing files
- Fixed numerous issues with commands being enabled when they shouldn't be, doing the wrong thing if triggered via hotkeys, or not checking to see if things were possible before trying to do them anyway. Or they did nothing at all
- Fixed numerous regressions caused by last update's switch to an entirely new application model
- Fixed a number of UI inconsistencies or crashes due to UI trying to process invalid frames (or frames being processed in a batch operation)
What's Not Fixed
- Documentation. I had wanted the documentation to be fully overhauled for the next update, but there wasn't time for this
- Bugs. There have been a couple of bugs reported which we haven't been able to reproduce and therefore fix. If you experience a software crash, please try and explain the context of the crash to give us a fighting chance to fix it
What's Next
- .NET 4. With some exceptions most of our products target .NET 3.5, and this is now hurting development - it's time to move on. Not that I plan on giving up on beloved WinForms for WPF!
- Palettes. While Gif Animator needs to be easy to use, it also should offer support for power users. Palettes are an important part of animations and Gif Animator currently has poor support for these
- Advanced Optimisation. Another powerful feature of GIF files is the ability to have tiny images with only the changed pixels from the previous frame. Again, Gif Animator doesn't make it easy to make use of this functionality
- More Bugs. There still issues on our backlog to be resolved and likely more to be discovered
Update History
- 2014-03-27 - First published
- 2020-11-23 - Updated formatting
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The founder of Cyotek, Richard enjoys creating new blog content for the site. Much more though, he likes to develop programs, and can often found writing reams of code. A long term gamer, he has aspirations in one day creating an epic video game - but until that time comes, he is mostly content with adding new bugs to WebCopy and the other Cyotek products.