Jasc Animation Shop

This is an animation program for creating animated GIFs and other simple animations. So let's say you have a website and you want to animate a couple things: a loading screen, a banner, a basic GIF, etc. Animation Shop is an easy way to do this. You start with one or more images and you can generate professional-looking animations with relative ease, helped by the Animation Wizard and the Banner Wizard. The program was sold as trial software and was also included with Paint Shop Pro 7, 8 and 9. It's not necessarily going to meet every possible graphics design and animation need, but for basic uses it's something you may want to check out. This software has been around for a very long time, so while the interface looks old, it is tried and true.

The program was designed for the Windows versions of its time, such as 98, 2000 and XP, and many users still run it on later versions of Windows. This program is popular for custom modifications within some specific gaming communities. However, Jasc as a company no longer exists: it was acquired by Corel in 2004 and version 3.11 is the last release, so your options for technical support are limited to what can be found online talking with other users.

Its wizards make it easy to turn a few images into an animated GIF or a web banner.

Features:

• Creating animations from one or more images
• Frame editing: cropping, flipping, mirroring, erasing, painting and drawing
• Saves animations as GIF, MNG, AVI, FLC, FLI and ANI (animated cursor)
• Most commonly used for GIFs but can be used for other purposes as well
• Frame view with frame numbers and delay times under each frame
• Modify individual frames and change how long each one is shown
• Play animations and preview them in a web browser
• Onion skin view for comparing a frame with its neighbors
• Optimization Wizard for reducing the size of GIF animations for the web
• The effects menu includes image transition, transition length, frames per second, image effects, and text effects
• Jasc Animation Shop used to be bundled with Paint Shop Pro

Conclusion: might be worth checking out specifically if you need to animate small files.