How can I make an animated GIF with the iPhone SDK?

Question

Animated GIFs are awesome. Does anyone know how to create and save them using the technologies available to the iPhone?

Answer 1

Animated GIFs aren't awesome, they're the past, they're extinct.

Answer 2

I don't think generating animated GIFs is the type of thing UIKit does. My understanding is that UIKit is a framework for creating user interfaces, whether it's for the iPhone or otherwise.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

The UIKit framework provides the fundamental objects for constructing and managing your application's user interface.

Answer 3

There's no built-in way for generating Gifs (animated or otherwise) on the iPhone. However, it's just data, right? There's nothing stopping you (except, uh, patent issues) writing your own generator, but it'll be a lot of work.

I suggest starting here, the Wikipedia page for gif - it gives a basic overview of the file structure. From there, I'm sure you can build your own!

Answer 4

To make a GIF, you simply need to specify a series of images and then bundle them as a GIF.

There are lots of bits of source code out there in plain C that will convert images to GIFs, and you can use plan C on the iPhone.

Here's some C code to create a rotating image GIF: http://www.catenary.com/howto/rotate.html

In my apps, for displaying GIFs, I use a small library: http://www.stijnspijker.nl/, though there were some leaks in the source code that we had to clean up.

Answer 5

Try using this C library:

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

Remember the iPhone is a POSIX-compliant device and C is just a subset of Objective C.