Ulead Systems

» see ulead.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

GIF Animator is the one I actually used. Turkish forums in the early 2000s ran on signatures, and a signature was a small animated banner sitting under every post you made, cycling through your hardware list because the whole thing would not fit in a single frame. You built that in Ulead GIF Animator. Nobody I knew paid for it, which is a different sentence from saying it was not worth paying for.

The company behind it was founded in Taipei on 5 August 1989 by three engineers, and for seventeen years it occupied a specific and slightly invisible position in the software market. Ulead did not make the industry standard in any category it entered. It made the version of the industry standard that a normal person could afford and actually finish a task in.

PhotoImpact was the image editor, sold against Photoshop at a fraction of the price, and it was genuinely good at the web-graphics work that Photoshop treated as an afterthought. VideoStudio did consumer video editing back when that meant a capture card and a lost afternoon, with MediaStudio Pro sitting above it for people being paid to do the same job.

The distribution is the part that explains the reach. Ulead software arrived bundled, on the disc that came in the box with a scanner or a video capture card, which meant a Taiwanese company ended up with its tools installed on machines in countries where nobody could have named it. That is also why almost nobody thinks of Ulead as a company they had a relationship with.

~ the case file ~

~ the animated signature era ~

For about a decade the animated GIF was how the web moved. Banner ads and spinning envelopes on contact links, and above all signatures, which on Turkish hardware boards were their own competitive sport. GIF Animator made all of it approachable because it handled the tedious parts on your behalf, from frame timing to the difference between replacing a frame and drawing over the one underneath.

Version 5 was the last one that mattered, and it never officially went past Windows XP. It also quietly told you the truth about where the format was heading, since by then it could export to Flash and to video, and Flash was eating the work GIF used to do.

~ how it got absorbed ~

On 13 April 2005 InterVideo, best known for the WinDVD player, acquired Ulead Systems for around 68 million dollars. On 28 August 2006 Corel announced it was buying InterVideo for about 196 million, and Ulead came along inside that. It was delisted from the Taiwan Stock Exchange on 24 October 2006, and the Corel deal closed on 12 December.

After that the catalog was picked over rather than killed outright. VideoStudio was the piece Corel wanted and it is still on sale under the Corel name today. Everything else was allowed to stop, with no announcement and no final release, which is how most software of this class actually ends. GIF Animator was simply no longer for sale one day, and there was never a date to point at.

~ what outlived it ~

In 2006 the animated GIF looked finished. Flash had taken the ads and the games, and a 256-color format from 1989 was something you apologized for still using. Then the format came back, because it turned out that a two-second loop that plays itself with no player and no permission is exactly what a conversation needs, and every messaging app since has had a GIF button in it.

So the tool died and the file format did not. Somewhere in an old forum thread, on a board that still loads, there is a signature banner still cycling through the specifications of a computer that was thrown away twenty years ago, rendered by software whose owner no longer exists.

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