Cyotek Gif Animator Revision History Create and modify GIF animations quickly and easily

Added

• When logging an exception, diagnosis actions are such as new version downloads or links to workarounds are now displayed, if applicable
• Added the ability to save and load presets for each effect
• Effect configuration dialogs now include additional commands for controlling and viewing the zoom of preview controls
• Added new Decrease Colour Depth commands, allowing you to optimize a high colour image to 8bit, 4bit or monochrome, with options for configuring number of colours, custom palettes and dithering options
• Added a new option to control whether or not new pre-release (beta) versions are included in update checks
• Sliders now have tooltips
• Looping data is now read from ANIMEXTS1.0 extensions

Changed

• Gif Animator now requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5
• Reinstated the GifInfo tool
• FreeImage updated to 3.17

Removed

• Windows XP is no longer supported
• The Optimize Image dialog has been removed, and replaced with separate commands for colour reduction
• Disabled glass effects unless using Windows Vista or Windows 7

Fixed

• Fixed a rare crash when building the thumbnail list
• Effect previews now run on a different thread and no longer block the UI
• Fixed a crash that occurred using the External Tools dialog and the Environment Variables sub menu was clicked
• Fixed an issue where token menus (for example those in the External Tools dialog) containing environment variables could be excessively wide
• Fixed an issue where multiple copies (mostly hidden) of tool windows would be created over successive runs of the program
• Fixed an issue where the report information displayed in the GifInfo tool could be truncated for larger animations
• Fixed an issue where the Animation Preview window wouldn't process frame durations correctly
• In certain circumstances, command line arguments would not be parsed correctly
• Fixed an issue where font sizes could be processed incorrectly

Fixed

• Fixed a crash resizing image reels introduced in 0.0.5.1

Changes and new features

• Temporarily removed digital signatures, these will be reinstated shortly

Changes and new features

• Added experimental support for localization
• Added new fx and fy arguments to the command line client, allowing the location of frames to be specified
• The Animation and Frame properties windows now make better use of space when enlarged
• Help updated

Fixed

• Fixed an issue where untitled animations with modifications were not handled correctly by either the Save All Changes dialog or the Save All command
• Dragging image files from File Explorer onto the animation document now correctly adds them to the animation rather than opening them as a new file (regression from 0.0.2.0)
• Fixed an issue where top level menus disappeared and were inaccessible if the application window was too narrow
• Fixed an issue where some unsupported commands such as Float were incorrectly enabled if the document mode was set to MDI, causing a crash if these commands were executed
• Fixed a problem where optimizing a frame to use the global colour palette could set the transparency colour to an invalid value, causing a crash when trying to change the transparency
• Fixed a crash that occurred when trying to open the same file multiple times by dragging it from File Explorer
• Fixed an issue where the Create Global Palette dialog would display an validation error but still allow you to submit the dialog and then crash
• If the Optimize Image dialog can't be submitted due to a validation error, it now tells you the error instead of just doing nothing when clicking OK
• Help accessed via modal dialogs now honours the user's Help Preference for displaying online or offline help
• Fixed an issue where the online help option didn't correctly navigate to individual topics but always displayed the index page
• The RSS extension will no longer kill the hosting application if it crashes while deserializing feed data
• The Export Frames, Optimize Image and Create Global Palette dialogs now attempt to map relative paths to the current animation file name, avoiding a problem where a relative path would be mapped to the application directory
• Fixed a crash that occurred if a frame had an invalid disposal method
• Fixed a crash that occurred if a frame had a location outside the available frame bounds
• Fixed an issue where the command line tokeniser didn't correctly combine multiple arguments with the same name
• Fixed an issue where the command line tokeniser incorrectly interpreted the /? switch as a filename
• Application now correctly terminates if an exception dialog is displayed that offers the option to keep the application running but the user chooses to exit instead
• Exception dialogs that are not necessarily fatal now use the correct terminology
• Fixed an issue where a beep would play when performing some commands such as Copy or Select All despite the command executing correctly

Changes and new features

• Added Repeat Last Effect command
• Added a new option to the Optimize Image dialog that allows the global palette to be copied to the local frame palette
• Added a new tool for selecting the transparent part of an image to complement the existing palette selection
• Added a new tool for changing the size of an animation and automatically repositioning frames within it
• When pasting an image from the clipboard that is larger than the current animation, a new options dialog is displayed which allows you to resize the animation, resize the image or crop the image
• The Add Frame and Replace Frame commands now make use of the same options dialog as pasting from the clipboard if the image being loaded is larger than the animation
• Added a new Resize Image command that allows you to resize the images within individual frames
• Added a new Resize Animation command that allows you to resize an entire animation in a single step
• Added tool tips to indicator icons
• Added new rules which determine how frames are rendered in the preview window when all frames have their disposal method set to Undefined, improving animation previews
• Added a new slider which lets you control the size of preview frames in the image reel
• Interpolation modes are no longer used when the source image is at 100% zoom or higher
• Status icons are now arranged horizontally along the bottom of the image reel when the image reel is set to scroll horizontally
• Added a new option to control if transparency is show or ignored in the image reel
• Thumbnail generation for image reel's are now performed on background threads, making for smoother scrolling while jumping around large animations
• Greatly increased the performance and decreased memory requirements when creating post processed previews for complex animations
• The colour and style of the transparent areas of image controls can now once again be configured (disabled since 0.0.3.0), including the ability to edit the colour schemes
• Added the ability to view and select a frame by index from the animation editor
• The Image document and Animation Preview window now supports the Copy command
• Clipboard commands are now correctly enabled in windows that support edit controls
• When using the Copy command to copy an image to the Clipboard, in addition to the opaque Bitmap format, a transparent PNG format is also copied
• When using the Paste command to paste an image from the Clipboard, if a PNG format is present this will be used in preference over the Bitmap format
• Added Windows 10 to application manifests

Fixed

• Fixed an issue where some commands either crashed or were executed incorrectly if they were triggered via their respective shortcut keys
• Fixed an issue where the Cut, Paste and Delete commands would incorrectly perform the action on read-only edit fields
• The Save command now remains enabled even when other tool windows have focus, as long as the active document is an animation
• Fixed an issue where changing a value in a numeric up down control in the Options dialog and then pressing enter would close the dialog without accepting the changed value
• Fixed an issue where ellipsis characters could either be displayed as expected, as a square or as a peculiar smudge
• Moving to the start or end of an animation via the Home and End keys is now considerably faster
• Fixed an issue where statistics were no longer being automatically saved
• Fixed an variety of issue where the image reel either ignored the Show Final Frames setting, incorrectly placed thumbnails when the setting was enabled or didn't update thumbnails to mirror the setting
• Fixed an issue where start-up errors were not displayed automatically
• Importing an animation that uses a global colour palette now correctly converts the imported frames to use a local palette
• Pasting an image from the clipboard now inserts the new frame at the current selection instead of after it
• Effect commands are now correctly disabled if the current document isn't an animation and no longer cause a crash if the current selection is invalid
• Fixed a crash that occurred when replacing a frame image with one that was smaller than the existing one
• Fixed a crash that could occur if the preview size of the Image Reel was calculated to be negative
• Fixed inconsistencies in how repeat counts were handled when toggling the Looping check box in the Animation tool window
• Fixed an issue with the GIF encoder where sometimes the NETSCAPE extension block was written when it shouldn't have been
• Fixed a crash that occurred trying to access the Effect Builder from an empty animation or invalid frame
• Fixed an issue where the transparent colour was incorrect after replacing the image of an existing frame
• The Move Frame and View Original Image commands will no longer crash even if they are triggered in an invalid state
• Fixed an issue where the using the Optimize Image dialog on an already optimized frame resulted in UI inconsistencies
• Fixed an issue where saving a document with a new name didn't update the Recent Files list (regression from 0.0.2.0)
• Fixed an issue where some settings (for example Fixed Font) wouldn't be loaded correctly in different parts of the UI (regression from 0.0.2.0)
• Fixed an issue with numerous commands that weren't binding events correctly leading to their being enabled when they weren't in a valid state (regression from 0.0.2.0)
• Animation preview window wasn't using any custom view settings (regression from 0.0.2.0)
• Fixed an issue where font settings may not apply correctly (regression from 0.0.2.0)
• Fixed help commands not working (regression from 0.0.2.0)
• Backups are now once again taken when saving over existing files if the appropriate settings are enabled (omitted from 0.0.3.0)
• Tool tips are no longer displayed on menu items

Changes and new features

• Added new extension which allows sprite sheets / texture atlases to be created from an animation, with a variety of export options
• Added new Watermark effect. This effect allows you to blend another image in a frame with optional positioning, rotation and opacity options
• Added new Text effect. This effect allows you to overlay text on a frame, with similar options to the above Watermark effect plus styling options.
• Images using the WebP format are now supported
• Added support for multiple documents
• RSS extension rewritten, RSS data is now common for all Cyotek applications and should result in the same article not appearing as read in one product and unread in another
• The GifInfo GUI client has been removed. The /i switch of the command line client is not affected by this change
• When using the command line client, if a file mask is used as a parameter, for example p1_walk*.png and no matching files were found, the processing is now aborted with a message and an exit code of 4

Fixed

• When applying an effect to multiple frames, if the effect makes use of a configuration UI, the dialog is no longer displayed once for each frame
• Repeatedly clicking column headers in sortable lists now correctly cycles between Ascending, Descending and None, instead of only Ascending and Descending
• Changing the window font is now correctly applied to the main window when the settings are applied, rather than requiring the application to be restarted
• Fixed a crash that could occur when attempting to obtain the display string for an enum value
• Fixed an issue where the RSS feed wouldn't update when the Update Now option was used, unless a daily update was already pending
• Fixed an issue where it was possible for part of the application window to be off-screen when starting for the first time on low resolutions

Changes and new features

• Added a new option to the Preview Animation dialog which allows you to specify how frames with a disposal method of Undefined are drawn. This is an interim measure until something more robust can be determined.
• Updated FreeImage to 3.16.0.0
• Added experimental plugin framework for adding image effects
• Setup now allows you to customize which components are installed
• Added product RSS notifications add-in
• Added a helper tool for backing up and restoring settings, or for resetting settings to default values
• Added a stand-alone update check tool

Fixed

• Fixed an issue where if the selected frame was changed using the keyboard, the status didn't update and would show the wrong frame attributes
• Fixed an issue where the update check could cause the main window to be unresponsive
• Fixed a crash that occurred when trying to create a global color palette for an empty animation
• Fixed an issue where colour settings were sometimes not loaded correctly
• Fixed an issue where font settings were sometimes not saved correctly
• Font sizes are now displayed as whole numbers
• Fixed an issue where only a single backup was created, and did not cascade according to the maximum number of backups defined
• Fixed an occasional crash resizing the application window with a collapsed panel
• Corrected baseline positioning of editors and labels in dynamic user interfaces
• Fixed an issue where settings were both loaded and saved using thread specific culture data, which could cause a crash if the computer culture information was subsequently changed. All settings are now saved and load using an invariant culture.
• A crash no longer occurs if font information cannot be read correctly from stored settings

Fixed

• Fixed a crash that occurred trying to use the new Check Animation Size tool on an empty animation
• Fixed an occasional The path is not of a legal form exception when using the External Tools dialog
• Fixed a crash dropping an invalid image file onto the application window
• Fixed a rare crash drawing a thumbnail in the image reel
• Fixed a crash that occurred when attempting to run two copies of Gif Animator at the same time and both copies tried to save the default tools list

Changes and new features

• Interlaced GIF files can now be loaded
• Color tables are no longer automatically increased to contain 256 colors when saving a GIF animation, but remain at the nearest power of two. (A palette will always have 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 or 256 total colors)
• Added a new Show Status Indicators option. When set, the frame reel displays additional icons showing the pertinent attributes of the frame
• Added new /SC switch to the command line client to strip comments from animations
• Added new /FT and /FTC parameters to the command line client to allow frame transparency options to be set
• Major internal changes to support working with indexed images easier and to reduce the amount of memory Gif Animator needs
• The command line client now allows implicit use of the /LOAD switch by simply specifying a single argument that is the name of the file to load and that ends with .txt.
• Palette dialogs now display the count of colors in the palette, and the index of the selected entry
• The Export Frames dialog now shows the final version of frames to be exported rather than the unprocessed image

Fixed

• In certain circumstances, creating a backup of a file could take a substantial amount of time
• Frame reel now correctly displays transparency again
• If an animation contained a global palette, but all frames in the animation contained local palettes (or there were no frames), the global palette would not be saved into the animation
• The transparent entry in a palette is no longer substituted with a unique color of the entry has the same color as another entry in the palette
• The Save Palette button featured in some dialogs now once again works after being broken in the previous build
• Fixed an issue where the Preview Animation dialog sometimes displayed an ugly mess rather than a nicely flowing animation
• Frame image lists now display transparency correctly
• Frame image lists were incorrectly calculating scaled preview sizes, causing some images to be squashed
• The progress bar in the Export Frames dialog didn't move when if the dialog was resized
• Transparency is now consistently applied to images that contain an alpha channel when converted to 8bit

Changes and new features

• Panels in Option dialogs now load on demand
• Option pages are now only initialized when requested by the appropriate dialog
• Added the ability to load and save Photoshop colour swatch files
• Added new Scale Thumbnails option. When set (default), frame previews are scaled according to the animation size, otherwise they are scaled according to the frame size.
• Added new Show Pixel Grid option for zoomed in images
• Added a new option for resetting the animation size to the minimum possible based on the contents of the animation

Fixed

• Reduced memory footprint of components such as the frame reel. This should prevent some of the Out of memory exceptions that have been reported.
• Corrected some duplicate menu mnemonics
• Popup dialogs didn't honour user settings such as Grid Scheme
• The image reel wasn't using the Interpolation Mode as defined by the user
• The Replace Image command only supported loading a subset of image files despite allowing you to select from a larger set of formats.
• Fixed a crash using the Replace Image command if the new image was larger than the animation size
• The Replace Image command now correctly increases the size of the animation if applicable
• Fixed a crash that could occur when adding a new frame that was larger than the animation size
• Fixed a crash in the Frame Properties view if the size of the current frame was larger than the size of the animation
• The context menu key now activates the context menu in the frame reel
• Resolved a problem where duplicate and/or invalid selection events would be raised by the frame reel
• Fixed an issue where clicking enter in a popup dialog (such as the Open File dialog) would trigger actions from the frame reel (such as showing a popup window)
• Dynamic options in the Options dialog are now positioned more sensibly in relation to the options label and editor, and other options in the same group
• Fixed a problem where tool tips did not display under certain conditions, or could display the wrong (or blank) text

Changes and new features

• Added support for reading and writing a number of additional graphics formats
• The main user interface can now be displayed horizontally
• The Image Viewer window no longer defaults to Fit when displaying an image, but now defaults to Actual size
• The External File Changed dialog now uses the same synchronized preview control as the Optimize Image dialog
• Holding down Control when executing the Move Frame Up command will move the selected frame to the start of the animation
• Holding down Control when executing the Move Frame Down command will move the selected frame to the end of the animation
• Added additional themes for configuring the appearance of the GUI client window
• Added the ability to load color palettes from DeluxePaint images (LBM or BBM)
• Export Frames dialog now displays progress

Fixed

• When dropping multiple files onto the Gif Animator window, the error window is displayed once for the entire drop (if necessary) rather than once for each invalid image file encountered
• Extension mapping for dropped files was case sensitive, so of for example you dragged a file name file1.PNG onto the client window, nothing would happen, whereas dropping file1.png would add the image to the active animation
• Fixed an issue where sometimes the width of the animation was not correctly increased when adding a larger frame
• The size of the animation wasn't being correctly reflected in the user interface when the size changed due to adding larger frames, ultimately resulting in a crash if you then tried to reposition a frame outside the original animation bounds
• The entire application should no longer crash if there's a problem painting an image in any animation reel or image box.
• Corrected painting artefacts when resizing tab strips
• Scrollbars were missing on views that could not be fully displayed
• Fixed an issue where the comments fields in the Animation and Frame tabs could disappear
• Fixed an issue where the state of the Move Frame Down and Move Frame Up commands did not change if the selected frames position did, causing a crash if you attempted to move a frame outside the frame range.
• Reworked tool bar layout code to prevent overflowed buttons
• Command line client wasn't returning 0 (success) on successful execution

• Initial Release