Flash Catcher Review

The Application seems to be a small utility to allow the user to save Flash animations from web pages to their hard disk.

The download is small, and the installer is fast. It gives you the option to instantly view the help file at the end of the installation process. The help file is colourful and contains screenshots, which are highlighted with key points. There are simple instructions on how to use the program. It could be a little more detailed, and the grammar and word choices look like it has been translated from another language.

After the utility has been installed, you will find that Internet Explorer now has a button on its toolbar. The button is a bit obtrusive and doesn't look very slightly. If the button was a little smaller or was an image, it would look a lot better and wouldn't stand out. I say this because an average person who downloads this utility would not want to use it all the time, only when required. So a small image that was in the status bar would be more than adequate. The button flashes green and red when it detects Flash content on a web page, which is really annoying when you don't need to use it. You cannot stop it from flashing until you navigate to a web page without Flash content, and considering that 50% of websites have flash on them, it could be a little tricky. There’s only one work around which is to right click the toolbar and un-tick Flash Catcher. This hides the button, and then when you need it you can repeat the process to display it. It’s almost not worth all the extra effort though.

Upon pushing the button, you are greeted by a window containing thumbnails of all the flash content on the page, and some buttons on the right hand side. The thumbnails do not appear to work properly, and all have remained white for me. But the design looks very nice. The colours are smooth and easy on the eyes and the rounded corners and stylish checkboxes help with the high quality appearance of the program. You can tick the checkboxes of the flash files that you want. Alternatively you can push "Select All" to select all the flash files. Then you push the button saying "Save". It takes a while to load up the next screen without any warning that the program is in fact loading. You are greeted by a "Choose Location" Dialog Box. From here you choose a folder to save the selected flash files into. The only problem is that you cannot create a folder in the dialog box.

The "Options" button brings up a Dialog box. From here you can change the default directory for Flash to be saved into. You can also make it automatically save files into the last folder that you chose. This has the added bonus that it seems to load faster when the "Save" button is pushed. There is an option to download from a cache, this is useful as it would make the download faster, but you can un-tick it if the flash content is always changing and you need to make sure you have the newest version. The final button says "Remind me while find flash on the current page", it doesn't seem to do anything from what I can see and the English is clearly translated form another language.