Well, I sought out the latest and greatest of two GIF animation tools i'd used in the past.
So far we had this from PhotoPlus:
Now some other applications......
Gif Construction Set Pro
Ulead GIF Animator
Both are trial copies, dont know what happens when they 'expire' but appear to be 100% functional (other than Ulead crashed) in the meantime.
Gif Construction Set Pro was easiest for me to get going with, however it is a bit more basic than the Ulead application. Within 15 minutes I had the following (compare to the above) using its built in "Transition" function (it generated the transition frames for me). However building a graphic like the one before would have even been simpler.
Ulead GIF ANimator - I was able to something similar in the Ulead program in about the same time using a function called "tween" (which Im familiar with from Flash), however it locked up on save.. (a sign? I dont know.. I gave up..) The Ulead application appears to have alot more functionality in it overall. It blew up on me though, so I dont know could be my system which is running multiple applications. It worked fine until I attempted to save my work.
Both products have fairly easy to use animation wizards to quickly put together basic animations like the first one I posted here.
I am in no way affiliated with any of the aforementioned products, just an old pirate thats been creating my own web content for 13 years.
There has to be some other graphics geeks out there, what tools do ya'll use?