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Today I'm pleased to announce the latest update for Gif Animator has been released. This new version is the first of our products to use new libraries that provide much more functionality that was previously available - even if the UI itself doesn't look that much different, under the hood it's very new.

Some of the notable changes in this update include

• Multiple documents
• Configurable window layouts
• Portable settings
• New Text effect for adding text to frames
• New Watermark effect for overlaying images on frames
• Ability to generate a sprite sheet / texture atlas from an animation

More information on smaller updates and bug fixes can be found in the release notes

We very much hope you find this update useful!

The help file hasn't been updated for this release, and so there's bound to be discrepancies between what help says and what the application does. We'll be updating the documentation in a subsequent update, and some of the new features will also be described in upcoming blog posts.

There is a lot of new code in this update, and while we've made some effort to test it, we can't anticipate or cover everything. So there's bound to be bugs. If you encounter any problems using this software, please let us know!

In addition to actual show stopping crash bugs, there may also be quirks of the UI that prevent you from working effectively. As an example of one noticed while doing a pre-release smoke test the Save button is disabled when the Frame or Animation properties windows are active. The software does think there's a good idea for doing this, but it doesn't help the workflow of someone who tinkers the properties of an animation and then wants to save without extra clicks! So we'll address that for the next release too.

We also haven't done much with performance. First time start-up is quite slow (slow enough that I ended up fixing the splash screen originally added for Spriter back in 2011 (but it didn't work and so was never switched on),) after that though it uses a new caching system that should help. However, we still have ideas to implemented to boost this even more in addition to still needing to do some dedicated performance profiling.

• 2014-09-21 - First published
• 2020-11-23 - Updated formatting

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