Product Reviews

BannerZest is a new graphics program that, as its name implies, adds zest to your banners. It creates rich Flash slideshow animations designed to sit at the top of your web page, showing off a selection of your favourite images in a variety of entertaining, wacky and professional ways. And the good news is that it requires no knowledge of Flash on the part of the user.

BannerZest uses a multi-window interface: one to choose your images, an Inspector palette where you control most of the slideshow, and one window showing the banner itself. It's a straightforward, modular approach that exudes professionalism.

There's a wide choice of banners available, with a variety of styles and themes. Coverflow simulates the Cover Flow found in Leopard's new Finder and in iTunes, and replicates that look immaculately. Accordion stacks images in vertical strips at the side of the banner, and clicking on each scrolls it open for you to view.

The rest of the themes run automatically, sliding from image to image in a range of innovative ways. There's Falling Stripes, in which new images drop in bar chart-like segments from above; Water Apparition, which has images rising, with reflections and ripples, from within a liquid surface; and Windy, which has square images flipping like beermats to reveal different images behind.

Some of the themes are decidedly wacky, such as Exploda, in which a squared-up image drops, bouncing slightly, to the ground. A fuse burns steadily down, and when it reaches the end, the image shakes uncontrollably before exploding, leaving a gaping hole in the ground before the whole process starts again with different

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images. Or try Rising Balloon, which has images lifted by balloons against a cartoon sky background, their titles hanging beneath, before the balloon bursts and another appears bearing a different image.

The Settings pane in the Inspector panel gives full control over every aspect of each theme. Cropping and panning images works independently for each theme and is straightforward in use, although it's a little irritating to have to scale an image using controls in a different window, rather than within the image itself. Sliders and numerical fields enable you to specify the height and width of each banner, although some have constrained aspect ratios; you can set the size, font, position and colour of type, the colour of background gradients and borders.

You can even customise the loading screen. Choose from progress bar, light or dark wheel, or pie chart; or customise the results, with the simple ability to set every single feature of each method. With 16 separate controls, everything is user definable, from the colour, fill, width, height, border and corner radius of a progress bar to the font, colour, glow and text of the wording that accompanies it.

Some settings are pertinent to particular themes, so, for example, you can set the colour of balloons, the speed of bounces, the transparency and angle of reflections, and so on. With this almost unprecedented depth of user control, the slideshows can appear precisely as you want them.

Publishing finished slideshows is easy, as you can set local or remote paths, target windows, and choose to convert images to Jpeg or PNG. The Publish window also provides an indication of the size of the finished animation. BannerZest integrates with iWeb, Dreamweaver, Freeway and more, and provides code snippets so you can include banners in networking sites.

BannerZest comes in two flavours. The Standard version includes most of the themes, while the Pro version adds support for custom-made themes and an image browser that can import images from iPhoto, Lightroom, Aperture and Photo Booth. In the Standard version, images must be dragged from the Finder into the BannerZest window. In all, then, BannerZest is any easy-to-use program that will liven up any web page.