Macromedia Flash has, in my opinion, transformed the way the average person views the internet ... with flash animation and interactivity going hand in hand ... However for the average website designer or small business owner the cost of such a product is often not worth the expense given that the user will most likely only use it on their own website ... and then most likely not to any serious level of professionalism.

In fact, in my opinion, if you were to give ten competent business people a copy of flash and say go design something for your website, most would be hard pressed to come up with something that they could actually use. I have no doubt that most would come up with something but would the quality be good enough to warrant exposure on a company website?

This could be said of alot of website design software. In the right hands these tools deliver tremendous results, however, in the wrong hands they deliver abysmal results. The funny part? The people using such software often fail to see that their designs look abysmal ... mainly due to the time and effort that has been involved in creation. And, these people should rightly be proud of their efforts BUT such sentiment has no place on a business website, in my opinion.

Sothink SWF Quicker however intends to change this somewhat ... by developing what can only be described as a low cost, cut down version of flash that allows even novices to design some pretty spectacular effects. Sothink have, I believe, hit upon a product aimed perfectly at the beginner to intermediate flash user, a product that allows users to take advantage of many aspects of flash without the actual steep learning curve or cost associated with Macromedia Flash MX 2004. Saying that, this is not a "replacement" product for Macromedia Flash.

Let us have a look at the product shall we. The intial screen looks remarkably like an early version of Flash...

Screen shot...

Let us now create a simple movie, the first thing we need to do is to enter some text, in this case we clicked the "T" from the left hand menu and clicked on the stage area... (the large white square in the middle) and entered our text... in our case "Cyber Aspect - Publishing"

Once we have entered the text, we click on the insert menu and then scroll down to the create effect menu item... clicking this with the left mouse button (tip - make sure your text remains highlighted as indicated in the following picture)

This then gives you the following message/option ... we select yes

We can then scroll through numerous effects, viewing the effects these have on our text in the preview window prior to applying them.

Once applied we then click file and export and the finished result is as follows:

This whole movie, which isn't the most complex in the world, took less than two minutes to make ... as a start it isn't bad and you could easily add other effects, text and images to this thus making something quite special in a realtively short amount of time.

Features:

1. Sothink SWF Quicker is a powerful tool to author professional Flash movies. It supports shape design, rich format text editing, movieclip and button creation, general or guided motion tween, mask layer, stream sound and event sound. It also provides a professional ActionScript editor which can help users to write ActionScript directly. Furthermore, it offers the ability to import SWF movies with intelligent motion analysis and full ActionScript support. There are over 80 configurable effects included in Sothink SWF Quicker. These pre-made animation effects can be further modified with a few clicks and parameter changes.
2. Professional ActionScript Editor
   Sothink SWF Quicker also provides a professional ActionScript editor which can help users to write ActionScript directly with assistants as syntax highlighting, auto member list, parameter information and auto code completion.
3. Motion
   • Motion Tween
     Support creating Motion Tween referring motioning around the canvas, scaling, rotating, and skewing. And you can set the tween's rotate, speed, etc. in the Property panel.
   • Guided Motion
     Provide Easy-to-draw Guide Line tool of various kinds. When you would like to create motion paths, with Guide Line tool, you are able to draw motion guide line more freely.
   • Mask Motion
     You can create Mask Motion in Quicker by using Mask/Masked layer with ease.
4. Customize Text
   By using the Text tool in the Tools panel, you can add horizontal text to any place in your movie. In the Text Property panel, you can customize all the properties of text, such as color, font, font size and URL link etc. Furthermore, you can give different color, font style, or URL link to a paragraph of text.
5. Shape Editing
   Support drawing and editing vector shape. You can resize, reshape, rotate or skew the shapes. And you can use the Fill transform tool to edit the color gradient directly. You can also import other popular vector formats including AI, SVG and WMF/EMF and use them in SWF Quicker.
6. Built-in animated effects
   To help users create professional animations or movies with ease, the program provides you with a number of animated effects so that you can apply any of the effects to your artwork. Instead of creating motions in the Timeline or writing ActionScript, a cool animated effect will be implemented by just a few clicks or value changes, which are actually some simple operations of your mouse or on the keyboard.
7. Support multibytes language text
   Multibytes language (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.) text is supported perfectly.
8. Stream sound
   Apart from the event sound, the program supports the stream sound too, which begins to play as soon as enough data for the first few frames has been downloaded. In addition, in the Layer section, the program designs a Stream sound layer to add sounds to a movie.

This a tool that is both extremely easy to use and also remarkably good value for money ... and in closing I would recommend this tool be in every website designers toolbox and not for those just starting out as it does make the application of certain effects extremely easy and quick...