Animated GIF Tool comes handy for MacOS and iOS developers, implementing rich-media applications, including sprite animations, delivered as GIF files.

There exists no ready-to-use Cocoa component to play back GIF animations (besides using UI/NSWebViews, which is not a perfect solution).
Here is where Animated GIF Tool kicks in. It takes a GIF file, extracts frame and loop count as well as ech frames timing information and stores that in a easy to use Property List file.
The image information can either be stored as a sequence of PNG or JPG files, or can be embedded as NSData within the Property List as well. The data can be loaded into NSImage or UIImage objects with there original (imageFromData:) method.
Please visit http://www.cocoala.com/AnimatedGIFTool for an overview.