We have previously reviewed GIF Construction Set here. Now, there is a new, Professional, version, which, you will be very pleased to know, adds so many bells and whistles to this already-best-selling program and it is well worth the upgrade.
   What is really super about this program is that you can do all sorts of animations. With its drag-and-drop functionality, you simply use your favorite graphics program to draw something and then drag it into GIF Construction Set Pro (GCS-P). You go back to your graphics program and change a little something, drag that into GCS-P, keep repeating the process, and you'll have an animation. While this one is a little complicated to do, it is accomplished with this technique.
   For those who are not graphically inclined, GCS-P offers a wide variety of ways to do certain things such as crop, rotate, move and the like. It even has a painting function built right in! Truly good. There is even a wizard which helps you get different images into the program.
   But what excites the mind in the new Pro version is a wide, wide variety of different things which allow you to make banners – really spiffy banners – transitions from one image to another, buttons and spinning graphics. You don't have to do much of anything, GCS-P does it for you.
  Not only does it do it for you, it does it fast. This banner, as it says, was totally completed in two minutes. That is impressive. And you can play to your heart's content. All of the banners, and all of the banner functions, can be previewed and tweaked. Go from one kind of banner to another and you don't even have to re-enter the text. By the way, we used this somewhat strange font just to illustrate that you can have any font on your system in these banners.
  Because of that, and the ability to change colors, textures and all sorts of other things, you get some pretty unique banners. If it took 25 seconds to convert the first banner above to the second, we'd be surprised. But look how different they look!
   Well, these banners can be big. They are, after all, GIF animations. So, GCS-P helpfully provides a very fine compression utility as part of the package (its built in). We tested it with a couple of on-line compression sites (which charge for their service) and found GCS-P compares very favorably.
   Now, this is really not a "banner" in the true sense, more a scrolling marquee. But it, too, is so simple to do that it is another great tool for your web pages. You can, of course, adjust a whole lot of things in these banners. We did this one with the "light bulbs" visible because we liked the effect.
   If that was all GCS-P did, in addition to its basic functions, it would be well worth the $20 registration fee. But there is more. Much more.
   What we really like is the transition effects. There's a super-neat "radar" transition. When you want to display several pictures on a page in the same place, placing them in one animated GIF file and then using GCS-P's transitions is a cool way to go.
   You can spin stuff, too. This little guy was caerfully made in Photoshop and GCS-P made him spin. We're impressed. Its not too shabby at all.
   Indeed, there are so many good things about GCS-P that we suggest you go to their site to check them all out. There is one other feature of this program, however, that is rather unique and that we want to point out.
   One of the major problems for people who put their graphics on the web is that people steal them. Its easy to do. You just download the graphic and it is yours. When you have spent a lot of time creating a unique set of graphics, it is somewhat gaulling to happen on another web site and see those graphics displayed.
   GCS-P has a rather unique Protection Matrix function which will break down your graphics into very, very small pieces. It then writes each part into a separate GIF file and constructs an HTML file which puts the pieces together. When someone tries to download your graphic all that person gets is a tiny piece of the puzzle. We're not saying it makes it impossile for someone to grab your graphic, but it requires a lot of work! Muchh too much for a casual graphic thief.
   Since you can adjust the size of the little graphics, this function can easily be used for image sclicing as well. That is a technique which allows you to break up a large graphic image into smaller parts to make the display of your web page go faster. A great feature.
   As is all of GCS-P. If you do any graphic work on your web page, you owe it to yourself to get this program. To be honest, the explaination of how graphics on the web work – which is included in the documentation – is worth the price of the program.

   Link to the GIF Construction Set Professional web site.