Cyotek Gif Animator Upcoming Changes Create and modify GIF animations quickly and easily

The following are changes currently implemented in next build of Cyotek Gif Animator. Please note that these changes are not final and may be removed prior to the next release. If you have any comments about these forthcoming changes, please contact us.

Nightly builds featuring these changes are available from the Downloads page.

The GIF Animator project is currently undergoing a refactor due to changes to underlying libraries. Some functionality may have been broken.

New

• Added the ability to edit colour palettes [incomplete, experimental]
• When saving a GIF animation containing non-optimal frames, a wizard is now automatically displayed allowing the animation to be optimised
• Added a new Animation Project file type
• Added new Margin option to the Watermark image effect
• Added a new Ignore Transparent Pixels option to the Watermark image effect
• Added a new Tile layout option to the Watermark image effect
• Command line parsing now supports use of @filename syntax, allowing arguments to be loaded from external files. The existing /load:filename command is now considered obsolete and will be removed from the next stable build
• Added the ability to toggle between horizontal and vertical layouts in preview controls
• The CLI client now supports the same range of image formats as the full GUI client
• The GifInfo tool has been given a face-lift and is now capable of displaying summary information for all images in a given folder, along with previewing images
• Added new /rm argument to the CLI client, allowing the reduction method to be customised between nearest colour, ordered dither or error diffusion
• Error diagnosis dialogs now include a reference to the original report
• The Optimisation Wizard is now available for any animation from the File menu

Changed

• Now requires Microsoft .NET 4.6
• The Create Desktop Icon option in setup is no longer checked by default
• Setup should now automatically uninstall previous versions
• Animation size is now displayed in window titles

Removed

• Removed the setup option for creating a Quick Launch icon
• Offline help files are no longer included in the setup; requesting help will always display the online version

Fixed

• When saving a preset, the name field now defaults to the name of the current preset
• GifInfo didn't display some application extension names correctly
• When saving an animation containing unoptimised frames, the GUI and CLI clients will now optimise the image using Floyd Steinberg dithering rather than nearest colour
• Image preview controls defaulted to a horizontal splitter instead of vertical (regression)
• Fixed a crash that occurred when closing an effect dialog while it was still generating a preview
• Some dialogs only supported local help requests and were unable to show help if the local help file was not available
• Fixed a crash that could occur when using presets with the Watermark or Text effects
• Fixed a rare crash that could occur when updating the preview of either the Watermark or Text image effects
• If Gif Animator was exited while maximized, the window state was not set back to maximized when the application was subsequently started
• Closing an animation now automatically closes any linked document windows, e.g. images, palettes etc
• Attempting to view the same image preview multiple times for the same animation frame now activates the existing preview window
• You can now correctly save images from image preview windows
• Saving a copy of a file no longer adds the file name to the MRU
• The left and right arrow keys couldn't be used to navigate the image reel in horizontal mode
• File Open and File Save dialogs now order the filters list alphabetically
• Fixed a crash that could occur if the properties of an animation or frame were changed but the animation's document window was not active
• Image reel thumbnails would not update when the global palette was changed
• Fixed a crash that could occur when RSS updating failed and the extension tried to update the UI from a separate thread
• Fixed an issue where Setup sometimes wouldn't replace files
• Fixed a number of issues that could occur after opening or saving a project and the MRU was updated [#161, #176, #177]
• Fixed a possible crash that could occur when trying to load a themed font [#203]
• Fixed a potential issue where the last character in a directory path could be removed [#213]
• Empty analytics sessions are no longer transmitted
• Fixed an issue where it was possible that text tokens weren't replaced
• Fixed a crash that could occur when trying to set frame transparency
• Setup would display an error stating Unknown custom message name "lcid" if an appropriate version of .NET Framework was not installed and was required to be downloaded by Setup
• Trying to set the height of an animation via the Animation Properties window didn't work
• The Reload From Disk command now remains disabled if the active document doesn't support reloading or is untitled
• Uninstall should no longer prompt for feedback when running Setup to upgrade an existing installation
• The resize editor always acted as though the Keep Aspect Ratio option was checked
• Exception reports no longer include the user name of the current user
• Exception reports no longer include the raw host name
• Partial output is no longer printed by CLI tools when using the quiet switch
• Statistics are now printed when using the statistics switch even if quiet is also specified
• All output is now correctly written to log files when the log switch is used, irrespective of the quiet switch setting
• Setup programs were only signed with SHA256, meaning Windows Vista couldn't read the signatures
• Setup tried to install .NET 4.6.2, causing an installation failure on Windows Vista which only supports 4.6.0
• A crash could sometimes occur trying to set the tooltip for a frame
• A crash could sometimes occur trying to calculate the visible frames
• Fixed a crash that would occur the first time you tried to use the Open command and no other documents were open