Penny-pinching Flash designers rejoice! This full-fledged Flash studio has a plethora of features, a straightforward work flow, and a knockout price. SWiSHmax’s wealth of easy-to-use features let you design stunning animations in no time. The program also features its own scripting language, SWiSHscript, which you can use to create Web menus. You also can design Web forms. We found the interface clear and handy. The time line makes it easy to overlay and edit multiple layers of text, sprites, and images. The program can export SWF animations into AVI and Flash Projector formats. Our one major complaint is that the 15-day trial isn’t enough time to evaluate such a complex tool. Powerful and quite easy to master, SWiSHmax is indispensable for folks who design banners and menus for Web sites. If you’re looking for a low-cost alternative to Macromedia’s $700 Flash Professional, you’ve come to the right place.

Swishzone

SWiSHmax has everything you need to create stunning fully interactive Flash animations. You can create shapes, text, buttons, sprites, and motion paths. You can also include more than 230 ready-to-use animated effects including explode, vortex, 3D spin, and wave. You can create your own effects or make an interactive movie by adding actions to objects. A scripting language allows you to program sophisticated operations into your animations. You can preview your animation inside SWiSHmax without launching a browser or external player, and live editing lets you make changes while the animation is playing. SWiSHmax creates all the files you need to upload to your Web server, or you can generate the HTML code to paste into an existing Web page.