One User's Opinion of Wildform SWfx

© 2001 by Foster Coburn. All Rights Reserved.

Review of Wildform SWfx

About a year ago I looked at a program called Swish. It created various special effects that could then be used in Macromedia Flash projects. Now I'm going to look at a similar product called Wildform SWfx. Where Swish mainly dealt in text effects, SWfx is all text effects. Swish could also be used to build multiple pieces of text and effects into a single file. SWfx is definitely a one trick pony, albeit a pony with a huge number of cool effects.

So what do you get? There are 87 Flash 3 effects. If you use these effects, you can easily import the finished movie into a larger Flash movie. You'll also find 164 Flash 4 effects. To use these in another Flash movie, you have to use some ActionScripting to load the movie on the fly. This isn't a major problem, just requires a few extra steps.

For users that really want to push the program, you can create your own effects to add to the ones supplied. And yes, you'll find additional effects available for download on the Internet.

The interface is very straightforward. Just a single dialog box. On the left side of the dialog is a list of all the available effects. Considering what these effects do, the names don't really do them justice. Clicking on the effect name will bring up a preview window that shows the effect in action. Whatever settings are currently selected on the right side of the dialog box are used in this preview.

Next up is to enter the text you want used in the effect. As soon as you click on anything else in the main dialog, the preview will update with the new text you typed. Just below the text window is the font selection section. You can use any TrueType or PostScript Type 1 font on your system with the exception of Unicode encoded fonts. In short, this means pretty much any font you've got. Note that there is a bug that will cause text to get larger when a movie is imported into Macromedia Flash. Bonus points to Wildform for admitting to the bug and providing a workaround. Along with choosing the font and size, there are various settings for spacing, positioning and color of the text.

Below the Font section is the Movie section. Here you can choose the pixel dimensions of the graphic, the frame rate and whether the file is linked to a URL or not. You'll also be able to change the background color of the movie which defaults to black.

At bottom right are controls for how the file will be output and previewed. Each of the options is fairly self explanatory. One area that can get overlooked is at the bottom left of the dialog. Sync letters will make the effect apply to all text letters at exactly the same time. So if the text spins around, all letters spin exactly the same. Otherwise each letter is triggered after a delay that you can also specify in this same area. Using these two settings can dramatically alter each of the effects.

Just so you can get an idea of the results, I've include a couple of quick examples of what can be done. Both of these effects were created in no more than a couple of minutes. I was disappointed that there was no way to center the text This would seem to be a much desired feature.

To see either of these movies in action, right-click on them and select Play from the pop-up menu.

I like the wide array of effects provided, but I didn't like that I didn't have as much control over them as I did in Swish. Advanced users of Flash will most likely find there are ways to work around this, but casual users will only be frustrated. So while I like the simplicity of SWfx, there are things missing that decrease its value to me. For that, I had to knock down the score a little. But I'll keep an eye on this product and I think it can be extremely useful when properly tweaked.

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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.

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