Those 101 Dalmatians in the movies may have been adorable, but a
Flash text animation program named Magic Flare offers 101 items
just as cute — and not one of them is a dog.
While there are a growing number of Flash text effects creation
programs available these days, Magic Flare stands tall among the
competition.
That is because Epinoisis Software, the creator of Magic Flare,
did an excellent job selecting the 101 text effects to include in
the program. Add to that a cost of only $29.95 for the program,
and Magic Flare becomes a holiday present looking for a Web
designer's computer to call home.
Magic Flare's interface is clean and lively, and the program
itself is virtually self explanatory. Just by looking at the
interface and realizing the obvious, text effects can be made,
saved or exported, and put into use in a matter of a couple
minutes.
Following the interface from top to bottom, users can enter the
text they wish and then choose the number of frames per second.
In the example at the top of this story, we chose 12 frames per
second.
Users can then choose how they wish to have the text aligned
within the movie. Unlike many such programs, Magic Flare enables
users to have multiple lines of text, with each line featuring
the employed effect.
Users can then choose the effect to be used (in our example
above, we used the Fireworks effect), select the text and its
size, color, opacity, vertical and horizontal offset within the
movie, and the character and line spacing. The program works with
most of the fonts in the computer's library.
An effect can be applied to individual letters or synchronized
to have the same effect occur to all letters at the same time.
Only one effect can be applied to a movie.
The movie can be sized to the users needs, a background color
assigned, and then linked to another page or site, helping make
this an excellent program for creating animated banners.
At this point, the program does what many others do not —
it takes over all the HTML or Flash creation duties. Users can
choose to publish their animation to HTML, and it will create a
file in the chosen directory that can serve as the basis of a
page. It will put the necessary .SWF file in the same directory.
Users also can copy the information starting at
<object> and ending with
</object> in that HTML page and paste it into
another page. They then will need to copy the .SWF file into the
directory where the new page is stored.
Among those other 100 effects are several that are unique to this
and perhaps a very few other programs, including Autumn Time
Lightning (rain and lightning), Circle, 3D
Rotation, Flashlight, Old Film,
Projectors (as in search lights circling the movie), and
spinning characters.
Please note that with the various changes that can be made to
each effect, there is the potential for any number of unique
movies.
Magic Flare offers the ability to make truly outstanding entry
pages to a Web site or impressive banners for use within pages.
Combined with the price, it doesn't take a genius to know this is
one program to quickly add to your holiday wish list. If not,
you're barking up the wrong Christmas tree.
Magic Flare's interface is clean and lively, and the program
itself is virtually self explanatory. Just by looking at the
interface and realizing the obvious, text effects can be made,
saved or exported, and put into use in a matter of a couple
minutes.