SWiSH 2 review

The combination of creativity and control means that you can create very advanced animation effects, such as 3D orbits resizing and moving across screen, that would take days to set up in Flash, and which would then offer little to no editability. Making the creation process even easier in SWiSH is the new Interactive Playback toolbar, which lets you play back the current movie, scene or effect. Incredibly, this preview is live, so you can reposition, resize and reformat objects using the Shape, Transform and Colour panels, and even reposition and re-time effects on the Timeline, without stopping and starting.

As well as enhancing its animation capabilities, SWiSH 2 improves on interactivity. Version 1 let you add the most common actions for fetching Web pages and managing the loading and playback of movies and sounds. Now there are new actions for sending email and for sending JavaScript commands to the host browser. The most important new action is the TellTarget command that lets you control the Timeline in individual sprites, just as you can for the main movie.

If you're happy with all aspects of your project, you're ready to output it using the new Export panel. This now offers AVI video support complete with control over movie size and codec, but since this throws away the benefits of interactivity and vector efficiency, you're better off outputting your movie to Flash SWF format. The control over this has improved greatly with the ability to manage preloading and font handling across the movie as a whole, with overrides possible at scene and even object level. Even better, font and shape definitions are reused more efficiently, so your SWFs will be even smaller than before.

SWiSH 2 is such a major all-round upgrade that the program really does begin to challenge Flash itself. However, there are some limitations. To begin with, SWiSH isn't the right choice if you want to produce frame-by-frame cartoon animations like those produced by Toon Boom Studio (see Reviews, next issue). It also has some rough edges, isn't as rock-solid as Flash and doesn't offer some of Flash's more advanced features such as shape tweening, sound editing and the bandwidth profiler. The biggest difference is the program's lack of advanced ActionScript programmability. If you want to produce an industrial-strength, all-singing all-dancing, e-commerce site, then Flash is still your only option.

Of course, that won't worry the developers behind SWiSH, as only a tiny fraction of the Flash user base is pushing boundaries in this way. And, in any case, these power users will want to add SWiSH to their armoury to get at the program's amazing effects. Instead, SWiSH 2's main target is the huge army of Web designers who understand the benefits of Flash but have previously been put off by its complexity and price. For these users, SWiSH 2 offers all the Flash power they're likely to need in a more accessible package, and at a price you just can't argue with.

Author: Tom Arah