KoolMoves Update to a Cool Tool for Flash Development from Lucky Monkey Designs LLC
By Howard Berenbon
In February 2003, I reviewed KoolMoves, an innovative Flash animation tool from Lucky Monkey Designs LLC in South Carolina. Well, it’s been a few years now, and it’s time for an information update with version 6.1.2.
KoolMoves offers Website designers an easy way to create professional looking Flash movies (with sound) to spruce up the look and feel of a Website. For the past few years, Flash animation has been a popular way to improve the look and feel of a Web page. It’s popular because it attracts attention to the site, and is memory efficient. Now you can easy add animation to your Website
KoolMoves offers Website designers an easy way to create professional looking Flash movies (with sound) to spruce up the look and feel of a Website. For the past few years, Flash animation has been a popular way to improve the look and feel of a Web page. It’s popular because it attracts attention to the site, and is memory efficient. Now you can easy add animation to your Website
KoolMoves is available as a download from koolmoves.com. After a quick installation, you'll be designing your cool Flash movies in no time. The tool offers a lot of options to create simple or complex Flash effects. It also includes a list of pre-designed effects to modify, including impressive 3D effects, or you can just get creative and design your own. And the user interface can be adjusted to your skill level: Wizards, Basic, Advanced or Cartooning. Its specialty is cartooning because it was designed by a professional animator.
To begin your Flash design you’ll start at the main menu tool bar and add your graphics frame by frame until your project is complete. If you get stuck, Help is a click away with detailed instructions, graphic examples and even online tutorials. You'll learn to work with their drawing tools, clip art, buttons and sounds. To use the pre-designed text effects, select one, from a list of over a hundred. Enter your text, pick a typeface, font style and size, and then click on a template. Instantly, you'll see your text animated on screen. If you like what you see, just save it in the proper format and it will generate the html code needed to insert into your Web page. You can have one flashy text animation in less than 5 minutes. The designs can have your text twist, rotate, jiggle and jump, bend and bulge, fly in and out, roll in place, and more. They’re very easy to create, and called from your page with just a few lines of code. And don’t worry about the space your Flash file will take, because they use very little memory.
KoolMoves is not just a text animation program, but a compete cartooning animation tool for creating movies, frame by frame, with graphics, text, sounds and actions. For example, to begin your animation, pick a shape from the tool bar, add it to frame 1 and then select an action from either the Effects or the Transform menu. You can add effects and manipulate the object in several ways: rotate, scale, slant, squash, center, flip and more. Then advance to the next frame for more action. It also has a morphing feature that changes the object slightly between frames for smooth animation. You can also draw the shape you need with the drawing tools provided, add a solid color or gradient, change the movie background color and image, change the height and width, and add sounds to each frame. To preview your design in progress, just click on the Play Movie button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like, you can import a graphic object and design an effect around it. With some experimentation, you'll have that perfect flash movie for any Web site occasion. It would help if you had some graphics design experience, but it’s not necessary. Just check out a tutorial or two for help and some tricks. Also, help is available on the major screens, usually in the upper left-hand corner.
KoolMoves sells for $59 and will work on any IBM PC or compatible running Windows 98/2000/Me/NT/XP/Vista. It’s a great product for any Web designer, beginner or advanced, and you can’t beat the price for a program that works like a Flash animation studio than just a set of tools. Visit KoolMoves.com for more information.
