Hello, and welcome to this month's edition of A Spider Speaks. This column is dedicated to tips, tricks, and other information for every type of Mac user. Some of these tips and tricks may apply only to users of Mac OS 8.x, but I'll try to incorporate work-arounds for System 7.x users whenever possible. Comments or questions can be sent to my email address at erik@applewizards.net .
This month, as promised, I'm going to teach you how to make your own very cool animated GIF. The final product is included with the DOCMaker version of this issue and is called "macs-rule.gif." All of the little graphics (01.gif through 07.gif) are included for you to work with as well.
As I said last month, you'll need to grab GIFBuilder. It's available, completely free, at the above URL. Go get it!
While you're downloading GIFBuilder, open the "macs-rule" graphics in your browser to see just what we'll be doing and how we may get there.
 
Spiderism #2 — Let's Crank It Up
Because I was thoughtful, I numbered all of the little graphics for you. Open GIFBuilder and then drag all of the GIFs into GIFBuilder's "Frames" window. If they somehow get out of order, simply click and drag them to the proper numeric order.
Next we'll set some preliminary things. For one, we want this animated GIF to loop forever, so choose "Loop..." from the Options menu and select "Forever." Because we want this GIF to display well on a web page, choose the Options menu again and then select "Colors --> 6x6x6 Palette" — this will optimize your GIF for the web (using the 216 web-safe colors).
After that, you're ready to get into the nitty-gritty. So let's get to it!
 
Spiderism #3 — Get to Work
 
Click on Frame 2 in the "Frames"
window. You'll notice that it's a little
black graphic, 3 x 14 in size. By default,
GIFBuilder places every graphic in the
top-left corner. That has to change. To
make this black bar into a cursor, click
on the Preview window (if you haven't
saved your graphic yet it will be called
"Untitled.gif") and then use the hand tool to position the black line at the beginning of the white space — the text area, if you will — as shown above.
Because we want the text cursor to blink, we need to "remove" it or make it vanish. The simplest way to do it is to simply place another copy of "01.gif" after "02.gif" — the black bar — in our graphic. To do this, simply drag another copy of 01.gif from the Finder into the Frames window, then position it after 02.gif. At this point, your Frames window should look like the below graphic.
 
Now, click on 01.gif in the Frames window. Press the down arrow while watching the preview window, and notice that the cursor appears, then disappears, when 01.gif overlays it.
Next we have to make the "text" type itself. To do this, simply click on 03.gif in the Frames window. Drag the "Ma" image so that it fits in the white space — the text area of our graphic. Now, note the position of the frame in the "Position" column of the Frames window. Mine is (22; 27) — 22 pixels from the left, 27 from the top. Because we want the rest of the typed text to line up with the first two letters, we need to set them to 22; 27 as well. Select the remaining text images — 04.gif through 07.gif — and double-click any of the "(0; 0)" coordinates in your selection. You will be prompted to enter a new position. Type 22 and 27 in their respective boxes and hit OK. Voilà! All of the text images line up. Don't worry if some of them have a black background and block out the rest of the image — as long as all of the letters in the "Disp." column of the Frames window are "N" you won't have any problems in your final graphic. Now save your graphic with a name of "macs-rule.gif" or some other appropriate name.
 
Spiderism #4 — Wrapping Things Up
Okay, we've successfully imported our graphics, placed them in their correct positions, and saved our graphic.
To view the graphic in its animated form, choose "Start" from the Animation menu or press command-R. Stop the animation by choosing "Stop" or pressing command-(period). Whoa, hey, that graphic moves too fast! We've got to set the delay on each of the frames.
 
To set the delay, double-click in the Frames window in the
"Delay" column for each of the frames. Mine are set as the
graphic at right illustrates. GIFBuilder allows you to specify
frame delays to 1/100 of a second, but I generally stick to using
multiples of 10 for simplicity's sake.
Now that you've been walked through a very basic GIFBuilder
tutorial, feel free to make your own animated GIFs. Experiment.
Pay particular attention to the Effects menu — some simple, yet cool, effects reside there for your pleasure. Have fun! You're on a Mac, remember?
Oh yes, feel free to use the little graphic you just made on your home page to link to Apple at http://www.apple.com/ or to Apple Wizards at http://applewizards.net/ .
If you've got an idea for next month's column, I've always got an open ear at erik@applewizards.net . I look forward to hearing from you.
 
Fact of the Month:
Employees of Microsoft most certainly use Macs! How is this known? Well, one gentleman downloaded an animated GIF from the Microsoft website once. He opened the GIF up, and lo and behold, what were the comments in the file? "Built by GIFBuilder" — a Mac-only product!
