GifBuilder

» see nyctergatis.com/gifbuilder/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Version 0.1 came out on 31 January 1996, which puts GifBuilder at the exact start of the animated GIF as a thing ordinary people made. The format had supported multiple frames since 1989 and almost nobody had used it that way, because the tooling did not exist outside of specialists. Then Netscape 2.0 began looping them automatically, and suddenly everyone with a homepage wanted one, and on the Mac side the answer was a free program by a Swiss engineer named Yves Piguet.

The interface was a list. You dragged in images and they became frames in order, with a column of settings holding the delay for each frame and the loop count, transparency and disposal method sitting underneath. It worked out which colors the whole sequence needed and optimized the result, so a twelve-frame animation did not have to carry twelve full pictures. Version 0.5, dated 14 January 1997, is the one Piguet still points to as the best of the series, and it won a Ziff Davis shareware award in the graphics and multimedia category the year it appeared.

The output of this program reached me and the program itself never did. By 2002 I was making forum signatures for Turkish boards with my hardware list in them, on a PC, with whatever Windows animator was going around, and every spinning mail icon and animated divider bar on the Turkish web of that era came out of some equivalent of this tool. Mac-only freeware in Turkey in 1997 was a rumor. The machines it ran on were in advertising agencies, and that was not where I was sitting.

Version 1.0 arrived on 21 August 2000 as a Carbon port, which let it run on Mac OS X directly instead of in the classic compatibility box. That was the last release. It kept working through 10.6 Snow Leopard on Intel machines, quietly leaning on Rosetta to translate its PowerPC code, and when Apple shipped Lion on 20 July 2011 without Rosetta in it, an eleven-year-old binary with no maintainer had nowhere to run.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was for ~

Nobody made art with it. GifBuilder made the furniture of the 1990s web: rotating email envelopes, blinking new badges, the dancing baby after somebody else had rendered the frames, award seals, hit counters that animated for no reason. It was also the easiest way to get a short video out of QuickTime and into something a browser would play without a plug-in, which mattered enormously in a decade when plug-ins were the whole problem.

~ rosetta ~

Apple has killed more software with architecture transitions than with any product decision. Rosetta arrived in 10.4 Tiger in 2006 so that PowerPC applications would keep running on the new Intel Macs. It lasted through two more releases and was gone in 10.7. Everything that had stopped being maintained between 2000 and 2006 died on the same day, which is why so many small Mac utilities carry a 2011 death date and no announcement to go with it.

~ still downloadable ~

Piguet's page is still up and the files are still on it, in .dmg and in .sit.hqx, a compression format that itself needs archaeology to open. The page was last touched on 26 April 2017 and carries one line of policy: "Please don't ask me any kind of support for GifBuilder or clip2gif, I wouldn't have the time." The honest status is a program that is still freely available and cannot be run by anybody who did not keep the old hardware.

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