I've taken advice given to me and taken a look at AnimGet for making GIFs of my CC Demo antics. AnimGet is an interesting program, but I think there is some room for improvement. Namely: One might happen to be recording just in case something happens, and have a lot of frames they don't really want to bother saving. One might also enjoy being able to GIF-ify something from within the program.

I haven't been doing any programming that matters, so I'll ask ahead of time to see if it's worth the effort:

Should I write a program that does the same thing as AnimGet, but also allows one to select a segment, from frames x-to-y, and save them as a GIF right on the spot?

Here's what I have in my head:

I like this idea you have.

So do I. I would use this. Great idea!

Ah, 5 "Yes"s, I'll get started now.

While I'm trying this, if anybody's got an idea that would make downloading the software even more worthwhile, feel free to say so.

An option to edit the interval (in miliseconds, or seconds, or whatever) between each frame, individually and collectivelly.

This sounds nice!

Slowing down time, if thats even possible.

Slowing down time as in what Kurrus said, or as in... Making time... Go..... Slower? I should be to do the former.

Oh, I didnt really know what Kurrus was saying .

Kurrus basically requested that every frame of the GIF would be displayed for a user-specified amount of time. In other words, you can slow down the image, or speed it up, at different points.

It's looking like this software will mimic the GIF abilities of imageready, which, admittedly, is where I took the idea of a timeline from.. But that idea is used in most advanced GIF/video editors, so it wouldn't hurt to appreciate the idea by implementing it.

I don't think there'll be any filters, or superimposing, because that would obfuscate an otherwise simple program.

You're making this program? If yes, make a "multifile select" feature, for the love of god :D
Good idea, by the way!

I assume, by "Multifile select", you mean the ability to select more than one frame to specify a delay for more all selected frames at once. If this is not what you mean, then please do clarify. However, if it is what you mean, then note the blue area of my concept drawing, which has several frames selected. There won't actually be any files until you save your GIF, but I suppose support for opening and modifying already existing GIFs would be nice. That'll come later, basic function comes first.

Its just a feature that you put "Multifile select" and select all the files you want to transform in a gif, in a row
But the images must be GIF? Cause It could have an option to get .bmp images and transform then in GIF automaticly when creating the GIF

In addition letting you pick which frames to save, could you have FRAPS-style on/off hotkeys?

Also, a frameskip feature might be nice as well. The collective filesize of the frames really builds up quickly, and it's not always necessary to capture each one...

Sounds like a good effort though, I'll be looking forward to this.

@Cambiogris: These are some good ideas, and all seem mostly possible, except for the hotkey request, (And the slowing down time.. No software can do that.. Yet.) which I fear might not be. My specialty language is Java, and with my knowledge of it so far, it is not capable of reading keys from outside applications.

The easiest solution would be to use another language, but I don't know any well enough to do something like this. While I strive to learn more powerful, windows based languages, I don't know enough yet to make use of it. I could try to incorporate native Windows functions, but I'm not sure of it yet - so no promises.

@Jox: I am afraid that I have no idea what you just said. There may be a slight misunderstanding on someone's end, not sure which end.

Are you asking for the program to offer the option to export frames as BMP for later GIF-ification? Part of your message sounded as if you think the program exports the images as separate frames, then makes them into GIFs. While I could make this possible, the original idea was to skip that step completely, and save as a GIF immediately.

As for the Multifile select thing, it sounds like you're asking for me to implement an ability to create multiple GIFs at once, instead of doing things once at a time. This function sounds feasible, but not likely to be something I will have in the first release of the application.

Java is horrible and slow. That's your first flaw.

Your second flaw is cc saves frames automatically while holding print screen. No need for this.

Especially in java.