SWiSH 2

Macromedia's Flash format is the technology of choice for design-intensive Web sites, but Macromedia Flash the application is less popular. Just trying to create an animated banner with it reduces many first-time users to nervous wrecks. That's where the first version of SWiSH came in, providing a beautifully simple alternative for producing eye-catching, text-only banners. The free upgrade to 1.5 added bitmap and sound control, but version 2 is far more ambitious. It aims to be a real competitor to the full Flash program, easier to get to grips with and even better value.

The ambition is clear as soon as you've overcome the bizarre registration/copy protection scheme and loaded the program. Where SWiSH 1 smacked of shareware with its two floating windows, SWiSH 2 gets the full-screen treatment. The central Layout window is where you create your drawing and it's surrounded by an Outline palette down the left where you can select scenes and objects, a Timeline across the top where you manage animation, and a tabbed docker down the right where you can access multiple tabbed panels for controlling objects, interactivity and export. There's also new support for right-click context menus and you can customise toolbars and menus and set up keyboard shortcuts.

Inevitably, some of the simplicity has gone - hopefully 1.5 will live on to provide a first step on the Flash ladder - but SWiSH 2 is now a full-blown modern application with power to match. To begin with, where SWiSH 1 only let you manage text, now there are tools for adding lines, rectangles, ellipses and freehand and BÚzier-based shapes, though the lack of polygon and brush tools is disappointing. Once added, you can format your objects with flat colours, linear or radiant gradients and clipped or tiled bitmaps. There's even a dedicated Fill Transform tool for interactively managing these more advanced options. You can also control your objects by reordering, resizing, rotating, reshaping and grouping them.

Surprisingly, there's no text tool as such, but instead you use the new Insert menu's Insert Text command to add your text and then set point size, font and so on with a dedicated panel in the right-hand docker window. The same procedure is used to manage files imported with the Insert Content command, which now offers support for JPG, GIF and PNG bitmap formats, WMF, EMF and SWF vector formats and WAV and MP3 audio.

New tools

A completely new option available from the Insert menu is the Insert Button command. This automatically adds a bevelled button shape to your drawing, complete with four image states - Up, Over, Down and Hit. Each of these states is directly selectable from the Outline panel and can be edited to set up rollover effects. Rather than being limited to SWiSH's default button, you'll usually design your own and then use the Convert to Button command.

The Convert command is also the best way to create what SWiSH calls a 'sprite', but which Flash users will know as symbols. Once you've converted an object or group to a named sprite, you can right-click on it and use the Make Instance to create a linked copy. This helps editing efficiency, as you can edit the master sprite and all instances will update automatically. More importantly, only the link information needs to be stored on each frame, so the final movie is much more efficient too. You can also use SWiSH's Colour panel to independently change an instance's colour and transparency, adding creative variety as well as efficiency.