Animated GIF Object... HIGHLY BETA

["Matthew J. Sheats" <sheats(at)lanl.gov>]

Howdy Folks,

	Last week there was a short lived discussion about the lack of an
animated gif reader/writer for IDL.  Welp, far be it from me to let a
problem like that stand unchallenged.  So I began working on one.

	After about 10 hours of work, I have a GIF89A Reader working.  It's IDL
Object Oriented.  You instantiate the object, tell it what file you want
it to load, and it loads all frames into a linked list.  (So in memory).

	From there you can (at this point) display the gif.. and that's about
it for right now.  (Mainly because it's 4 pm on a Sunday, and I want to
go home).

	Right now it supports:

	* Full Gif 89a support (as far as I can tell)
	* Global Color Map
	* Local Color Maps
	* Comment Display (The Gif Workshop from Mindspring loves those...)
	* Looping (But won't loop infinitely..)
	* Loop Delays
	* Application Data BLocks
	* Assorted other goofiness I can't think of.

	So, if anyone wants to try it out.. I'd like a few people to run it
over there favorite gifs and see what happens.  Just drop me an e-mail
and I'll send it over.  At the moment, it requires my own linked list
class as well...

	In the next week I plan to add editing/writing capabilities, and better
data access capabilities to it.

	Thanks,

	Matthew Sheats
	Los Alamos National Laboratory
	sheats@lanl.gov