Flash Catcher Review

Flash Catcher enables you to save your favourite flash files to your local hard drive, for your viewing pleasure. Trough this program seems to advertise itself as something for the beginning internet user, it does require some more advanced input.

Right after installation, it offers me to read a help file. Not that it’s bad, but you would like to be welcomed by something more user-friendly, like a webpage opening in your standard browser.

After finding out that Flash Catcher would have integrated itself in my Internet Explorer, which sounded like a nice start, I opened up Microsoft’s well known browser and came to the horrific sight of a big flashy button being placed next to my address bar. At first I thought another spy-ware would have infested my computer, but alas. A nicer approach would have been an option when I right clicked a flash animation I would like to save.

Alright, so I clicked that ‘huge’ button and got a overview of all the flash animations on my homepage, quite nice. Next I looked into the options window, and I was surprised to see my the root of my hard drive (C:\) as being set to the default location.

So I selected the first flash animation in the dialog and pressed the ‘Save’-button which allowed me to save the swf file right to the place I liked. Trough this seems handy, there’s no after-download-support for flash files, my computer doesn’t associate swf files with any browser, and therefore it probably won’t on computers of beginning internet users who would be stuck after this step. A nice ‘My Flash Files’-folder in My Documents or ‘Flash Archives’-window in the application itself would truly help a lot.