Review: Swish 2

Homepage: http://www.swishzone.com/
Price: $49

Flash is one of the major ways webmasters can make some pretty amazing things happen on the web. You can add the kind of interactivity you'd normally find on a CD ROM, add full screen animations, and have animated adverts which dwarf anything that's possible with an animated GIF image. Over 96% of surfers can see Flash in their browsers, and properly designed Flash areas on websites can be very small in file size.

The main downfall of Flash, if there is one, is that the software that lets designers create it is one of the least friendly tools ever made. Making a simple animated banner with Macromedia's software would require a lot of training and practice. And adult webmasters are busy people - we need to get results fast! Oh, and did I mention that Macromedia's Flash tool will set you back $400 bucks?

It wasn't going to be long before someone had the bright idea to bring out a more compact and easy-to-use version of the Flash creation software. Swish version one was a tool which had less features but was very simple to use. It was also around a tenth of the price of buying Macromedia's full-blown software. It was so easy to use that I'd say that within an hour of downloading it, just about everyone would have been able to make their first Flash ad. And the web loved it. You didn't have to be a designer or spend hours learning the software. You could get to the important business of creating Flash files quickly.

The main problem with Swish was that ads which were made in Swish just kinda LOOKED like they were made in Swish. There were a limited number of effects which after a while just got tiresome. They were kind of eye-grabbing at first but after a while that exploding text effect looked like a lumbering dinosaur. Swish 1 didn't really use Flash to it's full potential: to use all the extra animation to do MORE than just grab the eye.

Getting noticed is an important part of selling - but what about the part where you give the surfer a good reason to buy a membership? What about teasing them? What about actually getting them to want to click on your advert? Fancy effects are visually interesting - but that's not enough. With that in mind, I decided it was time to check out the latest version of Swish and see if they'd added in any more features. And boy, had they.

Swish 2 is not an update, more of a totally new version. This new version seems to have most of the features of Flash. In fact, I'd compare Swish 2 to Macromedia's Flash software as you might compare Photoshop to it's far cheaper rival, Paintshop Pro.

When you start it up you'll get a main editing window:

And this is a WYSIWYG editing window. The white area has the dimensions of the final file - that's the size it will be in your viewer's browser. It was a nice surprise to see that you could just drag this rectangle to the size you wanted it to be. But you can also edit the width, height and background color accurately. If you were making a porn banner then this forms the background. Setting the file's width and height here is actually easier than it is in your average graphics editor.

One really good thing about swish over the main Flash software is that it's possible to learn it just by playing around. When I started using Macromedia's software, which I also bought, I found that you couldn't do that. Even the manual didn't help much. With Swish 2 things are a lot more friendly.

Once you've got the size and base color set up, it's time to add something. There's really four main things that you can add to your Flash animation:

An image.
Some text.
A movie.
A sound.

For the most part, if we're talking about making logos or ads for porn sites, it's going to be one of the first two.

At this stage, it's important to remember that Flash's whole appeal is that it's an ANIMATION tool. So it's a bit like a TV commercial as opposed to a static ad in a magazine. Things can move onto the screen, some text can fade in and then fade out, an image can expand from a small dot to fill the screen. Whereas with an animated GIF movement and different scenes will take up a hell of a lot of file space, that's not a problem for Flash. So you show a lot of information in that one little box without creating a slow-to-load monster-sized file.

By clicking one of these images:

You do the inserting.

Adding images is very easy. I played around and found I could either click the insert images button (and add .bmp .jpg. and .gif files) OR I could even drag an image from windows explorer directly onto the main editing screen. The images are best edited down to the size and compression you want them to be in before you import them into Swish. Neither Swish nor Macromedia's Flash authoring tool have image editors built in. Once you've imported an image, although you can apply some amazing effects to how it's displayed, you can't edit it. It's just an actor on your screen. But adding images was no problem at all.

If you're writing ads, the other main thing you're going to want to add is text. The adding in text part is just as easy as adding images. You click the T icon and you'll find a default block of text has been added:

Which can be dragged to any size and edited further with this window:

And again this worked a lot smoother than Macromedia's tool. Editing text in Swish is fast and easy. The control over the space between the words and the lines of text was especially easy to use. Setting the color was also pretty easy to do. I should also mention at this stage that you COULD write your text in Photoshop or Paintshop pro and then bring that image in here.

The most important difference between Swish and Flash, and where it's strength really lies, is with the ease at which you can add in effects and movement. Say you've added a picture into the scene, you can then click on that image and go to the insert menu, and then click EFFECT:

But that's only the start. Each effect has a seemingly infinite number of combinations:

Which can then be used to alter the movement in the way you want to. This business is extremely tricky in the original Flash software, but it's fairly easy here. Once you've picked an effect for each object (and some of the text ones are very good) you can then preview the Flash file in a number of ways. This sets Swish 2 apart again from it's earlier version. The array of effects you can create removes the old problem of the effects looking like they were generated with some kind of template tool. You can create something original and fresh here.

The movements in your Flash file are shown on what's known as the stage:

This is a timeline, shown in frames which, displays each object on screen (an image would be one object), when it appears (something closer to the LEFT appears first), and which effect it has applied to it.

Summing Up

If you're looking to get into making Flash adverts, Flash buttons, or logos for your sites, then this is definitely the tool to do the job. The only things that I could find that the full version of Flash did beyond what Swish 2 could do was some of the more advanced programming, and some of the more advanced drawing tools (like a pressure-sensitive paintbrush). But Swish 2 has everything that an adult webmaster could want to do - and a lot more besides probably. And at under $50 compared to $400, it's a hell of a difference in cost. As I've mentioned here, there's actually some advantages to using this tool. By the end of the first day you'll be making Flash ads. As much as I love Macromedia's tool, I couldn't say the same thing for anyone using that.

Scores:

Features: 9/10
Does most of the things the full Flash authoring tool does - some even better. This new version of swish is a completely different tool to the older one.

Installation and running: 8/10
One crash in my time using it which was corrected by restarting the software.

Newbie Friendliness: 8/10
It will take some practice but it's a very intuitive bit of software.

Help Files: 9/10
An excellent set of help and tutorial files here.

Overall: 9/10
Swish delivers the goods and could almost have been made for adult webmasters.

TOM ^"^

ICQ 12616560
Email tom@tomsnewbiebooster.com

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