SWFText Review

First impression: Looks pretty simple - the preview window, the options window, mostly everything I need to start working on a new project.
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Learning curve: about 5 minutes and you start to get the hang of it, although to test all the options available, a lot more time is needed.
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A LOT of options are available – text options (naturally, you also get font options), background options, interaction options, sound options and, of course, movie options.
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The number of manipulations that you can perform using SWFText is impressive. You can have arrows going from one side of the screen to the other, leaves falling, water dropping, stars moving and amazing space and ambient effects. I think there’s an option for just about anything you might want (even that old neon light effect that they used in those ‘Win 1 million Dollars’ ads). And I liked the way most of them looked, so quality was not an issue.
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You also get to change the text effects and particularly how the text appears (and disappears).
But there’s no option to separately modify the intro style, the outro style, or the style of the text while it’s on screen – you have to pick one style for all 3 actions. More customizability would be great.
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Thank goodness for the fact that the preview window auto-refreshes – it would have been a drag to manually refresh it all the time.
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I like the fact that you can include audio files in the movie – having a looping tune embedded in the swf file saves you from having to manually place it on your webpage. I would have liked to see a mute/play button though, so that the user can choose to stop the music if he/she so wishes.
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Plus, there’s a comprehensive help file, although you might not need it, since all of the options are quite easy to locate, and you sort of get a logical way of working through your project – Movie settings (Size, Speed), Background Options and Effects, Text Options and Effects, Links and then Music. It’s all arranged so that you can go through them in a consecutive order.
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It also seems to save your changes to the project automatically - a handy feature if you tend to close windows and forget to save.
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One objection though – the user interface could do with a lot of improving – the style, icons, etc. The eye-candy that you get with other software is missing. But don’t judge an app by its ‘cover’ - it does a great job, and that’s all that matters (though I still would have liked something prettier).