I'll make the white transparent while we're playing here, I'll also set the image in a green table so we can still see the black cube and transparent areas. Using GifCon I've also set the first large image in the animation to "Leave As Is".

The blink problem arises from the first image loading, it doesn't have anything on it. Everytime the large image reloads it makes the cube disappear for a fraction of a second. To stop the blinking we'll need to make a new first image. The new first image will actually be the large image with the cube already pasted on it. This time we'll start with the image below. I used PSP to paste the first image of the six cubes right on the back picture. I then loaded the remaining five images to play on top of the image of the cube.

Damn! now what happened? If your seeing the same as I am, you may have noticed the first of the overlaying cube pictures isn't covering up the cube that was pasted onto the back image. For a split second there are two cubes showing. No combination of options makes this problem disappear for my browser. What now you ask? Sometimes what you want to do just can't be done.

As a final try I'll make six images, each having the full back image, and one frame of the cube. This might seem like a long way to go to fix a "minor" problem, but as you'll see when you get to playing with animations, they're a headache more often than not.

Sure, it runs now, but it's also a bit over 30 kb compaired to the 6 or so kb it was using the smaller images. It's almost as though animations are trying to fight back. At least when using all the same size images there isn't many options to set, like placing the individual images or anything other than Remove by background. The trick now is to reduce this files size as much as we can. There are at least two options here also. The first, use GifCons Supercompress. This option will drop the kb count down to about 30kb. The best option, if your doing more than a few animations a year, is to subscribe for the use of Gif Wizard from Raspberry Hill Publishing. For $15 dollars a year you can reduce your animations sizes often by 50%. The program reduces an images kb count by deleting all unecessary color information from a file. While your playing there, you can reduce the number of colors an image uses from a high of 256, to a low of 2, and all between There is also an option to recompress .jpg images.

There are also problems with browsers not supporting all the options you can click in GifCon. The three that come to mind are, Remove by previous image, Nothing, and Leave as is. Previous image is not supported by almost all browsers. the difference between Leave as is, and Nothing, are yet to be explained to me. I sometimes use Leave as is, but I most always use remove by background, but never the others.

Another complication that sometimes arises is using too many animations on a single page. What appears to run on your site using your top of the line computer, Pentium class with lots of RAM, may not work at all for those less fortunate. I don't doubt you have left sites before the page even finished loading because there were too many animations Most people don't care how active your site is, they come for information or to download. You've all seen those Geocities pages that were about seven feet long with dozens of stuck animations. Don't let it happen to you.

Are the animations on this page running for you? If not, let me know and I'll divide this page up a bit more. As I mentioned, you never know for sure unless you ask.