Q5) GIF 98a related questions

A5)

a) Types of animated GIF editors available are :

There are a lot of editors available. Many of them are either Demo or Shareware. There are very few Freeware Animated GIF editors. The most popular of all the Animated GIF editors is Ulead GIF Animator. Its a 15 day demo.

b) Other products required :

To create an animated GIF, you would require a software, such as the one above, and the picture required to animated (multiple frames of the picture, depicting different actions), and know-how to use the above software. When an animation is created you have to loop it, to create the continuous animation effect.

c) Alternatives to GIF89a :

Macromedia Flash, The Flash Animator creates small, fast, vector-based drawings that can be viewed by users who have installed the free plug-in. Unlike GIF89a, Flash animations stream onto a document and will play as they download. Because the animations are vector based it's possible to enlarge or "zoom," because the images are scaleable, while maintaining the integrity of the image. Text is incorporated into the animation in such a way that a designer doesn't have to rely on what fonts a user has within his or her system, let alone deal with cross-platform issues.