Newbie looking to buy software

[bcire68]

I looking to get into flash development, and I've been looking into various software.

Can someone please tell me what software packages (as a newbie) that I should evaluate. For example, I can't see spending $700 - $1000 on Macromedia products, when Swish Max is $99. But then, I'm not sure how much extra functionality that Flash MX is going to give me, over Swish.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks,
Eric

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Eric
If you're just dabbling your toe in the water I'd go for the Swish option. (I've never used it myself but it has great admirers)
Flash will give you far greater functionality over Swish, but it's a matter of whether you need it.
Go for Swish, play around with it, if you get hooked and you need something extra, then you can go for Flash.
Egg

[budnick]

Hi Eric,

We searched for Flash programs two years ago (Macromedia Flash was too expensive) and picked Swish. Recently upgraded to Swishmax. We haven't been sorry.

The downsides are drawing tools that suck, no tweening and limited importing of vector objects. To get around this, we bought Corel Rave2 to draw, create simple tweens and create Flash objects to export to Flash. We also use Coreldraw 9 for drawing and importing into Rave to export to Flash. Rave is not a very good stand-alone Flash program (enormous file sizes and a tendency to crash to name just two), but it's certainly useful to us and has a Coreldraw interface

In my opinion Swish is head and shoulders above any Flash program in that price range.

Download a trial version and check it out.

Bud Cashon

[Albacore]

Try both! Doownload Swish and buy a design computer mag. it is bound to have a 30 day trial copy. Spend time on each piece of software because Flash takes time to learn and maybe buy a book that leads you by the nose through the harder parts.

If you are only doing occasional web which requires simple animation work then Swish should be the choice for you. If like Egg you want to develope sites with complex animation and have the ability to use one tool even to publish that site the Flash is the obivious choice. It all depends on how much movie content you have on your web page. If you only use this software very occasionally and it is only for animated text or very simple movies but the main use for the software is drawing then do not exclude Freehand or Illustrator but no to Corel Draw with its Rave because it is terrible

[bcire68]

Thanks for your comments, Egg, Bud and Albacore. I will definately check out Swish, and see if I can find a trial for Flash in a design mag (good tip, thanks Albacore). My next question is, are there any other packages that I need to check out, that have similar functionality?

My problem is I just don't know enough about flash to really know what I'm looking for, even with a search engine.... you can imagine what kind of results I would get with "flash software". Yahoo gave me 72,100,000 hits! I'm not sure that I want to weed through even a fraction of that.

Any help is appreciated.

Eric