Welcome to RCF - WHF

bigR · Oct 14, 2004

As promised, here's my opinion on these 2 Flash animation programs. I've purchased KoolMoves.

SwishMax seems a more powerful program, but has a major learning curve. I tried the first tutorial, and it was work, with a lot of switching between the tutorial instructions and the program. After an hour, I hadn't finished it.

SwishMax reminded me of Photoshop from a few years ago, in that you have to do *everything* yourself, manually. In Paint Shop Pro or other graphics programs, you could click in a dropdown menu to get a drop shadow, and then change its properties in the dialog box. A quick and easy process. In Photoshop you had to make 3 or 4 copies of the shape, and set the transparency level of each, then offset each a little bit, to make a drop shadow. This is how Swish struck me, that you have to already know a lot about Flash animations and be able to manually put them together, bit by bit.

KoolMoves is a simpler program to master, I think. It has several wizards for simple Flash animations, that you can easily customize. It has several views - basic, advanced and cartooning -- each with a slightly different set of tools. You can go from one to another with a single click, so you could start a project in the wizard, then customize it easily.

SwishMax has built-in scripting. You can construct scripts from consecutive fly-out dialogs. KoolMoves has scripting capability, but you need to download the scripts and copy/paste them into the script box, or you have to know how to write scripts yourself. This feature may explain the higher price of SwishMax.

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Either one sounds like too much for me! LOL However, if I were to attempt to learn one I think it would be KoolMoves. Visited the web site and read some about it.

I have Swish because someone gave it to me but I know very little about how to create anything with it, although I do use it a lot to edit templates that Nighrider made for RCF. SwishMax is suppost to be much harder than Swish and from what you say it sure sounds like it. The first tutoral in Swish is not very difficult at all, even I could handle that. I think I need to avoid SwishMax.

Considering the type work you do, bigR, I'm sure you will get your money's worth out of KoolMoves.

sunny

Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

Yes, when they upgraded Swish to SwishMax, they overly complicated the whole thing. I am disappointed that they chose the more complicated approach over what made them popular to begin with. SwishMax may be embraced by those who use Flash MX, but I think they lost most who create flash movies for fun. There is no good reason why SwishMax has to be so complicated...

Brick wall