GifBuilder byYves Piguet Release Notes

Note: This is a copy of these release notes. Please search the www with keywords of:

GifBuilder Yves Piguet Release Notes

For the original file/s in their full context.
This document is for my own personal study and education.

Thank you!

Google search GifBuilder+Yves+Piguet

GifBuilder byYves Piguet
Release Notes

For each release, main improvements are listed first, followed by minor modifications and bug fixes.

0.5 (1/14/97)

- select/cut/copy/paste AppleScript commands (and the corresponding AppleEvents)
- Frame icons in the Frames window
- In the position dialog box, one can specify relative offsets, and velocities; and center the selected frames
- Transitions (dissolve, slide, push, wipe, peel)
- Static filters (blur, flip, monochrome, tiles)
- Dynamic filters (blur, tiles)
- Add Matte
- Animation cropping

- The animated GIF files created by the Convert command applied to QuickTime movies and Filmstrips have again the correct size
- When one jumps to a frame by clicking it or with the arrow keys, the background is based on the preceeding frame if its disposal method is Unspecified or Do Not Dispose; this makes the positionning of frames (translucent or not) much easier
- New and Open get rid of the memory structures used by Undo, which prevents the case where one couldn't open anything after having worked with a large animation
- Decoding GIFs with an height of less than 5 pixels caused a crash; fixed
- Position and open/close state of windows are restored at startup
- Refreshes the preview window after a cut or a paste
- Undo restores the animation size
- Zoom control for the Frames window
- Hilighted default buttons in the dialog boxes
- Don't disable the Edit menu anymore when the Frames window is hidden
- Status message at the bottom of the Frames window during loading and saving
- Once imported, Photoshop layers have now the Do Not Dispose disposal method instead of Revert to Background (an unfortunate attempt to solve the case where some layers have a smaller size than the background layer)

0.4.1 (10/3/96)

- Colors window with palette file drag and drop from and to the window
- Direct loading of the global color palette of GIF files
- Drag and Drop of the animation file from the Animation window, as a file or as an HTML image tag, and file selection in the Finder when the animated GIF icon is clicked
- "Revert To Saved" command
- "Copy HTML Image Tag" encode all national, reserved and punctuation characters
- "Add Frame" adds after the first selected frame if one exists, or at the end
- When there isn't enough memory to load all the frames of an animation, doesn't display one error message for each extra frame
- The Animation or Color window hasn't to be active in order to shift-click the transparent color
- The cursor is reset to the arrow when a dialog box is displayed
- Animations are saved correctly when the Animation window is closed, and the offscreen allocation error (resulting in the "Probably not enough memory" message) should be much less frequent
- ObjectSupportLib isn't necessary anymore, unless GifBuilder is scripted on a PowerMac
- In the Animation window, one extra row of pixels was erased, which caused blinking; fixed
- More Macintosh Easy Open friendly
- Shortcut ('d') for the Don't Save button in the dialog which asks if the last modifications should be saved
- Grayscale grays of depth 3, 5, 6, and 7 weren't spaced equally; fixed
- Stops the animation when a new one is opened
- The "Create GIF" command has been removed from the AppleScript dictionary (the corresponding AppleEvent was removed in 0.4)
- More error messages
- 32 bits/pixel images were sometimes rendered with dithering even if the dithering option was off; fixed
- The hand-shape cursor was displayed when it was over the info region of the Animation window and the current frame had a negative enough vertical position; fixed
- The arrow-shape cursor wasn't resored when the dialog box asking whether the last modifications should be saved was displayed; fixed
- When Frame Optimization was on, the first frame wasn't cropped to its visible part; fixed
- When the second radio button was clicked in the inteframe delay dialog box, garbage characters appeared in the text field; fixed
- When a frame is dragged out of the Animation window, the frame comes back to its initial position
- The color of the border of the Animation window is mapped to the current palette
- Frame optimization sometimes resulted in garbage for large frames; fixed

0.4 (7/8/96)

- PICS, Adobe Premiere FilmStrip 1.0 and Adobe Photoshop 3.0 RGB and grayscale layers import (as animation)
- Photoshop bitmap, grayscale (or duotone), indexed and RGB files input (as frames)
- Built-in 6x6x6 palette
- Optional suppresion of unused colors
- Frame expansion
- Option + arrow keys to position precisely the frames
- Onion skin during frame positionning with the Option key
- Save Selection
- New stops the animation
- "create GIF" AppleScript command removed (use the object model instead)
- Minor cosmetic improvments
- Crashes when one drags too many frames fixed
- QuickTime movie conversion fixed (memory leak fixed, interruptible)
- Frames window automatic scrolling
- Explanation when ObjectSupportLib is not found
- Frame crop marks
- Transparency based on the first pixel wasn't always rendered correctly in the Animation window; fixed
- Error message for error -43 (file nor found)
- Memory leak when an error occured during the animation creation fixed
- Import Frame didn't display the imported frame; fixed
- No error message for corrupted TIFF file or unsupported TIFF feature; fixed
- The set data AppleEvent didn't work with boolean settings; fixed
- Animation size is frozen when a frame is dragged around

0.3.2 (4/30/96)

- All imported frames get their transparency, interframe delay and disposal method from the default settings, not only the first imported frame as before. When no frame is selected, the corresponding menu items are changed to reflect the fact that they correspond to the default values
- Frame size optimization
- PICT objects can be dragged into the Frames window from the Scrapbook or other applications
- Support for output depth of 3, 5, 6 and 7
- Fixed French dictionary (apostrophe removed)
- "White" transparency was set to the first color of the palette, which wasn't always white; fixed
- Disk-based frames were displayed in italic, not in roman; fixed
- Disk copies of frames weren't used to build animations; fixed
- When an error occured when importing a frame, the list of frames was left in an invalid state; fixed
- When new images were imported, frames were sometimes mixed; fixed
- When a QuickTime movie was opened from the Finder and saved as a GIF with Save, the QuickTime file was overwritten; fixed
- When a QuickTime movie was opened, the animation size wasn't reset to Minimum Size; fixed
- Copy HTML Image Tag now encodes characters outside the range 33-127 as %xx, where xx is their hexadecimal code
- Increased stack size on Mac 68k
- New kept the previous Image Size; fixed
- It's now possible to interrupt the loading and saving of animations with Command-.
- Check against out-of-bounds frames
- The system palette was used instead of the optimized one; fixed
- When an error occured during the loading of an animation, the Frames window wasn't always updated, leaving ghost frames; fixed
- Spinning cursor
- An extension block was written only when transparency or a non-null delay was specified, which resulted in lost disposal methods in some cases; now one is also written with non-unspecified disposal methods

0.3.1 (3/29/96)

- Save Palette
- Up, Down, Home and End to navigate in the frames
- Stack overflow fixed on Mac 68k
- "modified" property updated by the New command
- "set contents of..." fixed
- "make new frame with data {contents:someFile, ...} ..." fixed

0.3 (3/22/96)

- Double-click in the Frames window to change settings
- Support for limited number of loops
- "Special" Clear (Shift-Clear or Shift-Backspace) to delete the selected frames while preserving the timing
- Open; animations get GifBuilder's signature instead of clip2gif's (and thus get a new icon), so that a double-click open them in GifBuilder
- Scripting improved (get, set, create, delete, count, object model)
- Cut/Copy/Paste of single frames
- French AppleScript dictionnary (the very beginning of the French translation of my programs; shame on me for having waited sooo long (btw, mes amis francophones prŽfrent-ils des versions traduites ou des amŽliorations plus rapides? re->mailto:piguet@ia.epfl.ch))
- Copy HTML Image Tag
- Reload Frames in the File menu
- Watch cursor and highlight of the currently processed frame during animation building
- Checks the limit of number of frames (currently 256)
- Build replaced by Save and Save As
- The 'odoc' AppleEvent (i.e. a file dragged onto GifBuiler's icon in the Finder or the "open" AppleScript command) lets GifBuilder open an animation instead of adding a frame
- The animation size isn't saved in the preferences anymore, because it caused confusion
- The maximum number of frames now depends only on the available memory
- The "colors palette" argument has been replaced by a "color table" to be more consistent with the official registry (event code 'cplt' instead of 'cPlt')
- The delay dialog box displays the interframe delay of the selected frame(s)
- Cropping of the frames outside the animation bounding box fixed
- Display of the Y position in the position dialog when all the selected frames have the same value fixed

0.2 (2/6/96)

- Position of each frame
- Undo
- Photoshop-compatible color palette files
- Duplicate Selection
- Better frames window and minor fixes
- Minor menu fixes
- Sorting based on the Mac international utilities
- Some options are attached to individual frames; the global options (set when no frame is selected) are used only when the first frame is imported and when saving options
- Fixed "best" color palette; it's now based on all the frames

0.1.1 (1/31/96)

- Handling of the color palettes menu added

0.1 (1/30/96)

First release
Copyright 1996-1997, Yves Piguet. All rights reserved.