Swish Review – Discover the Best Alternatives to Flash

Flash is a standard technology these days, many people and corporations use it comprehensively in their sites, you may have considered getting Flash and make some Flash movies yourself. But you have been deterred by its high price and its steep learning curve. I don’t blame you for that. As Flash is not designed for the normal people to learn quickly it and start making what they want. Here’s where Swish  comes, a tool that’s much easier and much cheaper than Flash, the question is, how much easy is it to learn? How much of Flash capabilities can it provides? Will it make it that you will never need to use Flash again, or maybe it is just a tool for starters?

Easy To Use program for making flash – an alternatives to Flash

At first glance, Swish  seems extremely similar to Flash, and this can come as a shock, as you have probably tried Flash before and found it hard to learn. Here’s my assurance, although Swish  has tons of features and capabilities, it’s much easier to learn than Flash, as I will show you in this Swish review.

I made All the Flash samples in this review, each movie took me between 3 minutes and 15 minutes to make
In fact, Swish  is so easy to use that in a matter of hours, you will be able to create nifty animation quite easily. It’s as easy to create effects in Swish  as it is in Power Point (which is very easy to use in case you have no experience of using it), just choose the object you want to add effect to then choose the effect from the drop down menu, and voila, you have created your first effect. So easy, right?

Speaking of effects, there are quite many categories of effects in Swish , like Placing, Fading, Zooming, Blurring, Appearing into position, disappearing from position, and many more and inside many of those, there are multiple variation of these effects, even if you limited yourself to these effects, you can still make figuratively unlimited number of professional-looking movies. The good news is that you can download additional effects from the Internet that alone makes Swish  a very powerful tool for creating Flash movies.

Beside effects, there are much other stuff you can import into your movie, like videos, buttons, Vector graphics (from software like Illustrator) and sounds. And there are many pre-defined scripts to help you create a more complex movies, using these script may requires you to have a little programming experience, but it’s not the high level that’s hard to acquire(like changing the frame number where the script should start running in).

In case you are going with other Flash authors, Swish  has the ability to import.SWF files that are made in Flash, on the other side, all the final .SWF created in Swish  can be also imported into Flash as well. Unfortunately, you can’t open Flash files in Swish  and you can’t open Swish files in Flash either, as they’re both proprietary files owned by Adobe and SwishZone.

Advanced features of Swish

After you feel more comfortable with Swish , you can start expanding your ability to create even more stunning Flash movies at your own pace. For a starter, Swish  has its own scripting language, called Swish Script, that allows you to go beyond the ability of the program to create some very complex movies and even games, though you will have to learn some serious programming in order to be able to use it effectively for such purposes, but you don’t have to understand everything in it in order to make fantastic movies.

Swish Script is compatible with Action Script 2.0, the scripting language of Flash. Which means you can use many of the countless action scripts made for Flash from around the web in Swish , the bad thing is, Swish  doesn’t support Action Script 3.0, the latest version of the language in Flash.

Some other advanced features are the advanced export and drawing tools, like the shapes tools, and the blend effects (to add effects like bevel and glow and such). And the content management tool, where you can manage all the movie elements you created and reuse them however you want.

Conclusion

Overall, Swish  is a very powerful Flash creating tool, it will satisfy the Flash needs for the majority of people, in a much easier manner, for less than half the price. And over the long-term, you won’t find it hard to move to Flash in case you became an advanced user(you probably won’t need to move at all). If you were considering getting Flash before, consider getting Swish  first, as it’s the best out of all alternatives to Flash.