Review of Swish 1.51

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One User's Opinion of Swish 1.51

© 2000 by Foster Coburn. All Rights Reserved.

Swish 1.51

DJJ Holdings Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia
Web: www.swishzone.com

Software Requirements for PC

· Windows 95/98/NT4/2000 · Pentium 100 or better · 32Mb of RAM · 256 color display or better · Swish does NOT require Macromedia Flash be installed.

Software Requirements for Mac

No Mac versions is currently available

Cost: $30

In the last review I looked at Macromedia Flash. It is certainly capable of some incredible effects. But creating cool effects with text can be very time consuming if not just plain difficult. So I'm going to look over a great utility called Swish that will create the nifty text effects you need to put your Flash project over the top.

I'm not sure if there is anything special in the water, but some of the coolest little utilities are coming from Australia these days. Swish was created by an ex-Macromedia developer and it has one sole purpose. It animates text. You do have the ability to import GIF, JPEG and PNG files so that your text doesn't stand by itself. And you can use WAV or MP3 files to provide sound. But you'll find that in most situations you will take the finished SWF file and import it into Flash to add other elements and finish off the project.

At right in the Swish interface. You can see that it is very basic and is missing the always visible timeline found in Flash and other similar products. Each of the tabs take you to a dedicated function including the timeline. A second window will appear on your screen to represent your "stage".

Now that you've seen it, let's look at how simple it can be to create a movie. You click the text button on the main toolbar and a text object is added to the scene. At this time a Text tab will also appear on the interface. On the text tab you can type in whatever you want and format the text. Formatting includes font, size, alignment, kerning, leading and more. For some strange reason, Swish defaults to only showing TrueType fonts. By checking a check box on the Text tab, you can activate your PostScript fonts as well. I was about to knock the program for not supporting PostScript fonts until I found this hidden setting.

Where things get interesting is when you start applying effects to text. Select the text object in the Timeline and click the Add Effect button to see the wide array of effects that are available as shown at left. As impressive as this list might be, it truly only scratches the surface of what Swish can do.

Once you've chosen an effect, you can customize it to get exactly what you want. As an example, you'll see the dialog box for the Typewriter effect at right. You'll see five primary choices for this effect, but much more is available behind the Transform button. There you can continue to customize the effect to create your own effect.

Let's look at another effect so that you can get an idea of the wide range of possibilities. At left is the dialog for the Wave Effect. You can control the direction, movement, scaling, period of which the wave lasts and more. If you are a Flash user, ask yourself how difficult it would be to create this same effect. The time you save on a single effect could easily justify the small cost of Swish.

You certainly won't find all the programmability of Flash in such a simple utility. But there are a number of actions that can be applied to objects. This is done on the Event tab and is very intuitive. First you add an event and then you select the action that goes with the event.

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The last step of the creation process is exporting the finished animation to a SWF file. Move over to the Export tab and you'll find the settings you need. One really cool feature is that the size of the SWF file is always listed in the upper right corner of the program. As I mentioned earlier, most files that you export from Swish will get imported into Flash so that other graphics can be added. The imported file will be a single layer within Flash so you can't do any additional editing at that point. If you need to make changes, simply come back to Swish and re-export.

As a downloadable program, there are no printed manuals. But you will find good help files that explain the few things that aren't obvious. Within the help files are tutorials that walk you through several projects that will have you up and running in no time. You'll also find some very good sample files that you can explore to understand how they are constructed.

I guess by now it is pretty obvious that I really liked Swish a lot. The tools it provides are incredible, very simple to use and the price is right. If you are a Flash user, then you need to add Swish to your toolbox. Probably the best part about it is that you can start using Swish immediately to create animations. Within 15 minutes of installing the product I had created the movie shown at right. It just isn't possible to come even close to those results with any other program on the market unless you spend a huge amount of time.

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Foster D. Coburn III has written six best-selling books on graphics software and is currently the Webmaster of the Graphics Unleashed Web site.