Flash Catcher Review

Flash Catcher is a single-purpose program, so don't expect it do anything more than download embedded flash from the websites you visit. It's a small sized download (880kb), and installation was simple and quick. The setup adds a huge, misshapen toolbar button to Internet Explorer, and while it claims to "seamlessly integrate with web browsers," it didn't touch Firefox or Opera (browsers).

The toolbar button looked awful, especially when it flashed like crazy on a page that had embedded Flash. While there were no instructions on how to go about using the program, clicking that flashing button brought up a small window with thumbnails of the flash items available. The thumbnails are a good feature because I could find out which file I had to download. Selecting the right one and clicking "Save" brought up a "win32 unhandled exception error" and the browser crashed. Restarting the browser and opening the Flash Catcher window repeated the same error and crashed again. I did this a total of 5 times, each time with the error and crash, so I gave up.

The help file is bare-bones, covering only how to install or uninstall the program, how to buy it and how to contact the developers. But then, with a program this simple, I can’t think of much else a help file should contain! Instructions on how to use the program would have been helpful though, to the least tech-savvy of us.
Flash Catcher has a 10 day evaluation period, after which you have to register the program with $25, which you can pay through bank transfer or credit card.