I have been searching around for decent gif animation software for, well, ever. There are free ones and shareware ones and commercial ones with trials. Each one has been clunky in its own way, and I have spent way too much time screwing around with these apps just to make an ad image animate. Do I really need anything so cumbersome and unwieldy just to make an animation?

Here's a brief example of an experience with any number of gif animation tools:

1. start app.
2. figure out how to get an image into said app.
3. image in, but the color is all wrong. bright green has become pea soup.
4. find the color settings.
5. screw with color setting to no avail.
6. reimport higher color image, not full on pea soup, but still soupy.
7. try and find the settings to make the animation loop. takes way to long to find loop setting...
8. after finding loop setting, look for frame delay setting...even longer than loop setting.
9. save out gif.
10. gif looks like shit. start over, and screw with color settings again.
11. repeat with another gif app.

Today I found what for I had been looking. A simple gif animation tool. An application designed with so few bells and less whistles, a technology so simple and perfect and common, that I hadn't considered it. Being blinded by the GUI, I had lost touch with my roots.

I stumbled upon Gifsicle, "a UNIX command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations."

Simple, concise and one line:

After a myriad of crappy GUI tools that made me, well, a tool, I was reminded that sometimes the old ways are best.