Getting Started

Top  Previous  Next

A bit of history
SWiSH will allow you to create Flash™ content to add images, animation, sounds, and interactivity to your web site. You can use this application to create introductions, commercials, banners, menus, and complete web sites. SWiSH revolutionized the Flash™ industry with its first release in April 2000. For the first time, complex-text effects could be created in minutes that had previously taken hours to create in Flash™. SWiSH is so intuitive and easy to use young children enjoy using it, and it is being used in schools throughout the world.

SWiSH v1.5 was the second release in July 2000, which had the added ability to include both sounds and images in the animations. SWiSH v2 took another giant step. Along with its new interface, the application added many features to allow users to create richer and more complex animations and web sites. SWiSHmax improves on v2 with even more simple to use, yet powerful, features. SWiSH developers are dedicated to keeping the application intuitive and easy enough for the non-professional to use, while adding those features most requested by professional users. If you haven't already read a list of these new features, they are listed and described in What's New in SWiSHmax.

How your Movies are played on the web
SWiSH will create four files: the .swi - the file format that the application reads and writes to; the .swf - the file the Flash player reads; the HTML page or code the browser uses to display the Movie; the .avi - a video format. You can also create a stand-alone projector .exe file via the Flash Player (see the FAQ on exporting). To display your Movie on the web, you need to upload the .swf to your server. Although a .swf can be played over the web without being placed within a web page, it is typically embedded within one, so unless you know how to do this, you will want to upload the HTML page as well.

Helpful hints when creating your Movies
Flash has quickly become the technology of choice for creating rich, interactive, multimedia content for the web. Three factors that have greatly contributed to the technology's popularity are:

1.	the .swf format can compress both images and sounds

2.	the format allows for the inclusion/use of vector formats, scalable graphics with very small file sizes

3.	the Flash player's streaming capabilities, which allow preloading images and sounds into the visitor's browser cache, and animation to stream while playing, rather than making the visitor wait for it to fully download.

Keep in mind that, at the time of this release, most visitors are using a dial-up service to access the internet. Therefore, although your Movies will be streamed, the speed is limited. To ensure your visitors view your Movies correctly and without pauses in the flow of the animation, you will need to ask them to wait while a portion of your Movie has a chance to preload. The larger your .swf file size, the longer they will have to wait. We include a tutorial on how to make a Preloader, which gives your viewer the status on the loading .swf.

There are a number of things you can do to keep your file sizes smaller, to minimize the time a visitor has to wait for the Movie to begin. Images, music, sound effects and animation effects all add to the file size of the .swf and can quickly increase the file size. For this reason, it is wise to consider each of the files you plan to add to your Movies. SWiSH will allow you to compress both images and sounds.

Run through the tutorials we have supplied. These examples will give you good grounding in the use of SWiSH and how to put together a SWiSH-based web site.

Don't forget that there is a lot of support available through the growing community of Support Forums for SWiSH.

Keep on SWiSH'n.

Conventions used in this manual
Throughout this manual we refer to Menu selection options in the following format - Edit | Copy (Ctrl+C). This means to select the main titlebar 'Edit' Menu and from within it, the 'Copy' option. An equivalent quick key sequence is performed by pressing the Control key (Ctrl) and the C key together.