Plenty of useful GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) animation editors are available. You can do a search on the Web to find the most recent tools available. At one site, you can create your own animated GIF banner with text of your choice.

An easy and relatively inexpensive tool is Gamani’s GIF Movie Gear (see Figure 1-1). It is $30 shareware available from GIF Movie Gear: Home. It takes care of all the settings you might want to manipulate, without requiring you to learn anything technical about animated GIFs. Everything takes place in well-documented dialog boxes.



GIF Movie Gear makes creating animated GIFs easy.

In Figure 1-1, the animated GIF uses the seven still frames shown in Figure. Some of them are reused, which saves time in creating the images. The filmstrip is created as a horizontal strip because the action of the animation is mostly horizontal. It could have been just as easily set as a vertical strip. You can do everything from optimizing the palette to sizing the frames to setting the number of loops using GIF Movie Gear. You can preview your animated GIF right in Movie Gear. When you are satisfied, you can export the file to a .GIF file for use in your Web pages.