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I'll begin by saying that I plan to get my own copy: this is one cool little animation and graphics program! Animation Maker 3.1 by Voget Selbach Entertainment GbRmhH in Bornheim, Germany is the latest version of the year-old application: 3.0, released last December, was the first version to support GIF animation. That's what makes Animation Maker a good tool for creating web animations, except for one drawback we'll examine later: it imports PICT and GIF files, of course, but then you can paint, paste, draw, select, move or duplicate any portion of the frame right away, without switching over to a graphics program. When you're finished with your animation you can export or save it as a GIF, PICS, or AM Set format file. Your Movie Player application can convert the PICS files to QuickTime movies, too.

Anyone familiar with animated GIFs has probably used GifBuilder, the well-known freeware GIF animation application. Yours truly has used GifBuilder for quite a while. Nothing to it, really. So what is easier, if anything, about using VSE's Animation Maker? Simply put, it's fast, intuitive, and fun.

In many ways GifBuilder is more sophisticated, but with Animation Maker it's drop-dead simple to draw or paint in the animation window and crank out a nifty animation fast: draw-click, draw-click, draw-click, then run. You'll want to keep GifBuilder, but you'll definitely like Animation Maker for things like the lean, compact frames window: it's easy to click on each frame to see the image in the animation window or select contiguous blocks of frames to run as trial animations. Both these actions and the resulting animations seem to go more smoothly and quickly than with GifBuilder. The whole process of creating an animation is much simpler with Animation Maker too, because it decides things for you.

A pull-down menu gives instant access to various speed settings that affect the entire animation at once. No need to "Select All" first. Double-clicking on the frame name in the frames window produces a "Frame Information" window where you can set the delay for that individual frame, although the setting is figured as a percentage of the selected animation speed -- if you're reading this you won't have a problem, but it does require a mental mouse click or two for those accustomed to thinking in hundredths of a second. The good thing about this is that you can speed up or slow down the entire animation in one step and your individually-edited frame delays are scaled to the new speed setting. . .

Simplicity reigns in other areas as well. You don't have to choose things like frame disposal method with Animation Maker because you never get the chance! The program gives you just three choices for new frames: a nice new clean white (or any other color) frame/graphics space, a copy of the last frame, or an alias of that frame. The animation just above was created by dropping a 3DMF file into SimpleText, manipulating the resulting QuickDraw 3D image, copying each step, and pasting the image onto a blank frame. Being able to move the pasted selection anywhere in an instant and then toggle back to the preceding frame makes made it very easy to fine-tune the movement in the animation. Very nice and great fun. But there is one major drawback: unless we simply missed it somewhere, there isn't a menu selection for copying the HTML to the clipboard, like with GifBuilder. This means that unless you remember the size you selected when you opened your new animation window (or used a drawing tool to get a readout of the coordinates in the window), you'll have to drop your saved animation into GifBuilder or GraphicConverter to read the dimensions in pixels!

If you want to know the dimensions in the first place, that is. I like to edit raw HTML. But many people already use web page building programs like Claris Home Page and Adobe PageMill. Importing graphics with these applications is simple enough and requires no prior knowledge of the animation's x and y measurements.

Yes, the program has limitations, but other features go a long way towards making you forget that, like the very useful run/stop controls on the animation window itself. The graphics tools are quite limited but very easy to use, and there are surprising goodies, like having any tool become an eyedropper selection tool with a press of the option key. The text tool could use improving, but functions reasonably well. At least you have a text tool and can write all over any frame you like! Not bad. But I think one of the reasons I like this application is that it feels awfully solid and quick. It just seems to snap open and shut like it knows what it's doing. Animation Maker is very satisfying to use, and the animations themselves definitely run more smoothly than in GifBuilder. It's also easy enough to use that virtually anyone can make a great little animated cartoon in about 30 seconds, no graphics or animation expertise required.

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