Flash movies in SWiSHmax
are made up of shapes, text, and sounds. Shapes are drawn
using shape tools or by freely creating points and connecting
them. By using the Bezier tool, you can create complex
shapes easily. Shapes can be freely transformed so that
you can create perspective. If you want to freely
transform text like I have in the screen shot below, you will
need to first group that text as a shape. It can then be
worked with as a shape instead of as text.
SWiSHmax also doesn't allow you to select
the outline of an object as individual lines. For
example, if you want to delete the top black border of the
red rectangle pictured above, you won't be able to.
The entire border is one unit and is either on or off.
It would be nice to have line selection tools such as you
have in Macromedia Flash. We don't want to unfairly
compare SWiSHmax to Macromedia Flash. After all, the
price tag for Macromedia Flash is approximately $500 while
SWiSHmax is a quite affordable $99.95. Believe us, for
the price you pay, SWiSHmax is a phenomenal value.
Animation
We really loved playing with animation in
SWiSHmax. Creating animation is incredibly intuitive,
and the visual cues that SWiSHmax provides keep you well
informed about just what your animation will look like.
For example, if you are moving an object from point A to
point B, SWiSHmax displays a dotted line along the path of
motion.
Extremely cool animation
features make movement easy!
In the shot above, notice that there is a
dotted line along the animation path. To create this,
you simply set a key frame on the timeline and drag the box
to a different position. If you add additional key
frames, they appear as squares along the path that can be
easily moved as shown above. Moving the path causes
the completely animation to change on the fly.
You can also resize objects and reshape
objects at different key frames and SWiSHmax will add all of
the in-between frames to create a smooth animation for you.
We found creating animation in SWiSHmax to be highly
discoverable. What we mean by that is that you don't
have to read documentation and frustrate yourself while you
figure it all out. It really does go beyond being
intuitive. It just works exactly the way that you
would think it should work.