GiftedMotion for Mac

Aimed at those who are not animation professionals, GiftedMotion for Mac tries to offer an efficient yet easy-to-use tool for creating short GIF animations. It worked fairly well, with one notable exception; but for a tool geared toward the newbie, it could use some additional user guidance.

The free application downloads as a jar file and no installation is needed to run the program. The program's main interface lacked advanced graphics and appeared dated, but it did have buttons for its main features such as opening picture files to include, as well as ones for playing, pausing, and exporting animations. Technical support appeared to be absent, and the tutorial on the developer's Web site was short and lacked helpful instructions. While GiftedMotion for Mac claims to be able to use JPEG files, they did not load properly and returned an unclear error message. When using GIFs, the application worked as intended. Once loaded, the user has the ability to order the images, as well as the length of time that each appears. Unfortunately, there are no drawing functions, so all of the animation images must come from another source. The exported animations did work well once completed and exported.

For those who need a free tool for creating basic GIF animations GiftedMotion could prove useful, but it needs some work before it gets our full recommendation.