Amazing Animated Icons!
by John H. Farr

This is a good one, folks. In fact, this is the first time yours truly has registered and paid for shareware even before checking it out completely. It's that good, and that much fun, besides. What does it do? It puts animated icons on your desktop, and also in Get Info windows and any other place that icons normally appear! As the ZDNet download page indicates, this takes Mac users "into some frightening new territory," but it's a place many will get to know very well indeed.

The $10 Kineticon 1.0.1 package (by Sherman Uitzetter) consists of two main parts: a Kineticon extension that displays the icons (called kines -- pronounced "kinnies," as in "skinnies"), and an Editor that allows you to customize the provided kines or create your own. The editor is also used to select which kines are activated, and by double-clicking on a kine ("kinny," remember) in the editor's window, you can open and display for editing all the frames in the animation. All editing and creating takes place in this opened kine window: here is where you paste frames created in image-editing and graphics applications to create your own icons. You can also copy a selected icon image from the Get Info window of any file, paste it into a graphics application document, modify it to create a series of frames, and paste the resulting images into a New Kine editing window to create animated versions of pre-existing icons! In just a few minutes you can turn that Photoshop icon into a blinking eyeball, for example. The speed of the animation is adjustable, and you can set it to loop forever or to cycle repeatedly at a predetermined, adjustable interval (3 seconds, 10 seconds, etc.).

Kineticon provides basic flip-book type animation: the only way to extend the duration of individual frames is to add multiple copies to the sequence, and the only adjustments possible are selecting the speed (in frames per second) and loop forever, loop back and forth, or repeat every X seconds. This simplicity is not a drawback in any case, as you are dealing with an animation window of only 32 by 32 pixels in which subtlety is not an issue. It is still possible to create very sophisticated animations, however, and many of the provided kines are quite excellent. If you have worked with icons before or used an application like Icon Machine, you may already be familiar with masking issues involved with icons; similar rules apply in these circumstances and are thoroughly addressed in the Kineticon manual. Bottom line: making your own animated icons is easy and fun. You will want to do this in any case, once you have configured the Kineticon editor to enable your favorites from the menu.

The effect of having constantly moving icons on your desktop can be mesmerizing, to say the least; you may find yourself staring at the little beasties instead of doing productive work! And if you create your own, thereby adding pride of ownership to the equation, you may never want to shut your computer down. "Frightening new territory," indeed. And here is a suggestion that this reviewer has already tried: animate your Desktop Picture (Mac OS 8+) by designing kines and placing them in appropriate positions on your desktop! Imagine submarines or fish in the sea below the Cliffs of Moher, or birds flying across the sky. You get the idea. Great fun! You can also enable an animated icon for any file so that it stands out from its static neighbors for easier identification: your eye will quickly focus on the one dancing icon inside a particular folder.

The Kineticon package includes the 189K Kineticon extension, an 851K Kineticon Editor that requires about 2400K of RAM, assorted samples, and a manual, all for a $10 shareware fee that can be paid online. The software does not seem to have a specific system software requirement (none is mentioned), so owners of 680x0 Macs may be in luck. This reviewer, however, has only tested Kineticon on a PowerMac 8600/200 running Mac OS 8.

PROS:	Fantastic visual treat! Software is easy to use and provides for simple editing or creation of animated icons (kines). Quite a few of the provided kines are top-quality and look great just as they are.
CONS:	High distraction factor is either good or bad, depending on your point of view. Certain kines occasionally fail to animate immediately unless "touched" (selected and deselected), but this is rare.
CONCLUSION:	Life will never be the same after you put this software to work, and its low price ($10 shareware) gives everyone a chance to display their own animation efforts on the desktop.

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September 07, 2008