May 1, 2000

Swish is an Editor's Choice Award Winner! "This makes text in Flash a breeze!"

Swish is a terrific tool for creating text effects for Flash movies.

Click on the text image above to see some of the instant effects you can create with Swish. (You'll need Flash 4 to view the movie) The total time it took to create this simple movie was under 5 minutes and believe me, all I did was except all the defaults for each effect.

You start out by setting your general preferences for the movie. You have a nice tree view to keep track of where you are in your creation.

As with Flash you can set up scene names and target frame windows.

You also have a timeline similar to that in Flash which makes it much more comfortable because we're already familiar with it and we don't have to learn a lot of new things.

Now here is where the time savings really comes in. In Flash you would have to type out what you wanted for your text. Then you'd have to break apart each letter. Then you'd have to animate each letter. A very, very time consuming process. With Swish you simply type in the text you want and from the timeline tab pick the effect you'd like. A new dialog comes up for each effect giving you options on how you'd like your effect to work. Not sure what all those numbers mean? No problem...play a little. Change them around and right there on the dialog is an option to preview so you can see exactly what's happening each time you make a change and you can see the changes instantly just by hitting the preview button.

Then when you have everything set up the way you want you're done right? Wrong! Well you could be done if you wanted to be. But, you can also assign actions to your movies in Swish.

So now you're wondering how many pretty pennies it's going to cost you to get your hands on Swish. Well, you'll be surprised to know that Swish 1.0 sells for $30.00. Yep, that's it. Swish will pay for itself very quickly in time savings for all your text effects needs. Run over to Swishzone and pick up the demo. Check it out. The demo has limited functionality in that you won't be able to import anything you've created with Swish in the unregistered version. But you can sure check out all the neat things Swish can do for text.

Copyright 2000, Vikki Dawson, All Rights Reserved