GIF animation maker

[M. Lang / S. Railsback]

I just tried out some Windows shareware for creating a GIF animation
file from the .PNG files created by Swarm's raster save function. It is
"GIF Construction Set Professional", available at:

http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/gifcon.html

with a registration fee of $20.

The software has a wizard function with which I was able to create my
first GIF animation in about 2 minutes, couldn't be much easier. 

It was also easy to figure out how to create GIFs with few colors (e.g.,
a 180 kB GIF from 50 raster frames) or more colors (same 50 frames
result in a GIF of 692 kB).

The software also has a compression facility that reduced the full-color
GIF from 692 to 227 kB without any obvious detrimental effects. Look for
it soon on our web page...

Now I would be even happier if somebody could tell me why the following
code works under Linux and Swarm 1.3.1, but with Swarm 1.4.1 under NT it
produces the PixmapError "Cannot get geometry for desktop", function:
keep_inside_screen()

-(void) writeFrame {
  char filename[256];
  id pixID;

 sprintf(filename, "Model%03d_Frame%03ld.png", modelNumber,
getCurrentTime());

 pixID =  [Pixmap createBegin: [self getZone]];
 [pixID  setWidget: worldRaster];
 //[pixID  setWidget: nil];
 pixID = [pixID createEnd];
 [pixID save: filename];
 [pixID drop];

}

Steve
-- 
address@hidden
Lang, Railsback & Assoc.
250 California Ave., Arcata CA 95521
707-822-0453; Fax 822-1868

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