ANSWERED AND CLOSED

[Agent_Coop]

HAH!

Anyone who has what they believe to be a hold on knowledge, and in this case it is "Flash", always fears the public being able to do what they do. SWISH makes this so.

The same attitude was around when WYSIWYG editors like FrontPage allowed the common "peasant" to produce their own HTML.

SWISH, and other products like it errodes the hold they have on new media technologies.

I know that my own Flash/Director skills have inproved because of products like SWISH.

The pompous-art-decco attitude of the art community has now infected the last remaining frontier it appears.

GO DAVID! GO SWISH!
-Robyn

[johnie]

I am so happy that Cinder took the time to post my Swish 2.0 quote. http://www.dreamless.org/ubb/Forum1/HTML/002439.html

I can just feel the love!!

Swish doesn't make bad design- people do and I think Swish bashing (or other 3'rd party tool bashing) is just plain wrong.

I have noticed that third party tools have recieved a lot of Bashing.

Here are some recent examples:

http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...threadid=49169

http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...?threadid=4611

http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...threadid=59397

http://www.flashkit.com/board/showth...threadid=46553

The best examples were pruned from the Kool Moves Board (notice that the Kool Moves board only goes back to the end of July the flames of the product were so often the moderator of the board pruned the first month or so of the board.)

[Scills]

Just dropping in to say and high and support a fellow Aussie, and to get the email updates

[monkeypants]

Originally posted by Agent_Coop


I know that my own Flash/Director skills have inproved because of products like SWISH.

Agreed...A few months ago I got the demo of Flash , stared at the screen for a while...and uninstalled it. (Too much for my little brain) Then I bought Swish and worked with it for a few months. Now I've started with Flash again and so many of the funtions make sense because I got a start on things from swish.

[Iceberg]

I suggest that the people of this community use this critique as inspiration and prove him wrong

[flashopper]

David, this is really a discussion about poor design, and to name Swish isn't even logical. I've made things of poor design in Flash (in my early days) and text effects weren't a big part of it. I've done (what my clients consider to be) excellent design in Swish, and text effects were a part of that design. However, the tool has nothing to do with the design.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say this: my design skills have improved since Swish has become my primary swf tool. And here's something else: my last two major projects (both of which the clients were thrilled about) used extremely minimal text effects, but used them very effectively. The bulk of the time I spent using Swish on these projects was for the other visual images, as well as the sound -- and that time was a mere fraction of the time I would have taken had I used Flash. Swish benefitted my projects in every way.

I notice the speaker didn't point any fingers at Adobe After Effects, really the pioneer application for text effects, used mainly for television and films. You see commercials that utilize lots of text effects, some to their great benefit, some to their detriment. But the impetus for web text effects was really born from After Effects on broadcast television and in films. How many people ask how to do the text effect used in "The Matrix?" Is that Swish's fault? Of course not, rather, to its credit that the question is asked here, because this is the place to ask it -- it's just good design at work.

I for one am a proponent of any design element used well, and that certainly includes text effects, at no lower level than anything else. Even though I know how easy it is to create text effects using Swish, a well-used text effect can still take my breath away or make a powerful emotional or mental impact, and always will be able to -- it's all in how it's used, not the facility with which it's created or the application chosen.

In my mind, Swish is not a text effects app. In fact, ever since, 1.5 came out, I've never once considered it as such. It is an swf creation tool, and the only thing I don't use it for is cell to cell animation, and for that I use Koolmoves, not Flash. I was using flash to combine separate swfs into one movie (not a huge fan of the load movie thing, I'll use if I have to, though), but now that Swish 2.0 will do that, the things that Flash offers are still great but are more complex (form interaction, actionscripting), and I frankly don't have much use for them yet (I'm familiar with forms, but I prefer html, asp, or cgi to Flash, the forms interface just doesn't impress me yet). As time goes on I imagine actionscripting may become more useful to me, but for now, good design does not neccessitate me to know it.

I stand unphased by what this guy said. I went to the book store and paged through the Hillman Curtis design book, and I put it back on the shelf, not for me. After everything I'd heard about the book, I was fantastically unimpressed. I downloaded the trial of Swish, tried it for 10 minutes, bought it, and have never looked back.

Great design and great tools are what it's all about. Flash is a great tool, but I consider Swish even better. I'll supply the great design, you keep doing what you're doing, David...

[paporter]

OK, I finally was able to take the time to read the entire article, and I have to admit that I agree with what the man is saying.

It is unforunate that he had to use the term "No SWISH Text Zone" it would have been preferable for him to have said "No FLying Text Zone". After all Swish is not the only product that allows one to create flying letters. Swish just allows one to do it easier and better that any other product.

On the other hand it's like politics. A politician doesn't care if you mention him in a positive or a negative way as long as he gets his name mentioned. The fact that Swish comes to mind is in itself quite a compliment.

Brendan Dawes gives a very good rule to follow:

"If you're going to create something with Macromedia Flash, you've got to justify the motion."

I would like to suggest that We might do well to adopt this same rule:

"If you're going to create something with Swish, you've got to justify the motion."

In my opion this is simply a basic rule of good design regardless of the medium used to create it.

In conclusion, maybe I'm just to dumb to know when I've been insulted. I found the article informative. It gave me things to think about as I proudly continue to learn and use Swish in my daily activities.

Thanks David for sharing this article with us.

Paul

Originally posted by David Michie

His first proclamation: the lecture hall is now a "No SWISH Text Zone." (The audience begins to laugh in appreciation.) "Flying letters are like a cancer! They're starting to creep into TVs, movies, everything!"

You can read more here:
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia...age_nov28.html
He compares Swish to Mariah Carey, now that hurts.

Check out his website: http://www.brendandawes.com
Brendan is a new breed of digital designer. What he calls an 'Über Designer'

Comments please?

Cheers, David.

[Craig99]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Br3nny
[B]OK, looks like I hit a nerve. First off let me put the record straight.

Hey its funny that you put a presentation on your website and on the last screen your links go back to yout Mac HD..

Thats not very clever now is it ...

[jrswebdesign]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Craig99

Originally posted by Br3nny
OK, looks like I hit a nerve. First off let me put the record straight.

Hey its funny that you put a presentation on your website and on the last screen your links go back to yout Mac HD..

Thats not very clever now is it ...

LOL - shows how 'uber' he really is doesnt it!

[relay]

If I may toss in my 2¢, over a year ago I bought Flash 4, at a wallet-taxing cost, then several months later did it all over again with Flash 5....... until recently, even though I've had a reasonable amount of success as a traditional HTML web designer, I found Flash to be as user friendly as learning to read Chinese. When I came upon Swish I was skeptical, "not ANOTHER *easy to learn* (cough) program", I thought---- but it really was, and is, and I think it's fantastic. One of the nicest things I'm finding is that Swish is making Flash seem far less mysterious and complex. I'm sure I'm not the only one, and no doubt MM is aware of this "osmosis" effect Swish has on their far more pricey product. To the makers of Swish I can only say, WELL DONE, looking forward very much to 2.0

[purge]

Originally posted by David Michie

His first proclamation: the lecture hall is now a "No SWISH Text Zone." (The audience begins to laugh in appreciation.) "Flying letters are like a cancer! They're starting to creep into TVs, movies, everything!"

You can read more here:
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia...age_nov28.html
He compares Swish to Mariah Carey, now that hurts.

Check out his website: http://www.brendandawes.com
Brendan is a new breed of digital designer. What he calls an 'Über Designer'

Comments please?

Cheers, David.

Hey guys -

I have to throw out my 2 cents here..

David - I don't agree with them and there 'slander', but you should start expecting this stupid type of crap. It's like David and Goliath, literally. Think about it this way man... they consider you a threat and you'll dip into there profits ... I personally as a designer HATE flash... it's NOT A GRAPHICS PROGRAM it's a PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE (sorry folks face the facts it is NOT designer friendly) Anyway I've seen similar comments aimed towards Adobe Live Motion (which I will use over flash anyday of the week)...

Macromedia does not like competition so I wouldn't be suprised it they offer to buy you out.. hell... how do you think they got flash to begin with?! they surely didn't create it but bought it off another company...

- p u r g e -

Flash sucks... and flash splash pages are old and over used... think of something new...

ok now i'm done...

[purge]

I can make almost all of the crap that guy has in his 'headshop' with SWiSH.... Not only that but any moron that gives himself a name or title is an idiot...

what a moron... damn this put me in a bad mood

sigh

The Über Prick cometh!

- p u r g e -

PS - Directly off his site "The Über Designer cometh!."
He needs to learn english any 3rd grader knows you don't PUT A PERIOD AFTER AN EXCLAIMATION POINT

"Hi I'm purge I'm a jerk!."

sigh... I'm not done... *goes back to the site*

*comes back* his presentation for flash forward sucked... I mean good lord I can take screen shots and put them in swish... hey... I can even assign buttons I'll be damned THIS MAN IS USING SWISH!@#$!@$ HE'S IN DENIAL...

*goes back to the site*

...

*comes back*

And I quote:
"Brendan has been working in the new media industry since 1996, when he joined Subnet, where he later became..."

'Purge has been working alot of hours working on building up his ego and his 3rd person speech problem...'

Ok... I'm done flaming... this guy obviously had to use a picture of the swish logo because he can't speak enough english to spell it out ... 'HEY EURO.... SWISH, NOT ONLY THAT OUR FOOTBALL PLAYERS WILL KICK YOUR FOOTBALL PLAYERS ASS! Wait I'm not done cause I have GAME, AMERICA HAS GAME... so what you beat us at soccer... NO ONE IN AMERICA WATCHES IT!!!! IT'S AS FUN AS HAVING HEMROIDS SURGICALLY REMOVED... but you know what... We make up for your sissy candy ass sport... and this is a garendamntee... and it's called 'WAR' ... scoreboard euro's... why? cause stone cold 'purge' austin said so...

okie... i'm done sorry... I had to release...

[Ivanopulo]

OK, Bren realized it was a bad joke, and apologized. So it is cool.

It is posted at Dreamless forum.

"OK, here's what I'm gonna do. David, I'll remove the swish logo from my slides and replace it with some flying text imagery (BTW - I know about the 'local' links, I just quickly whacked up the slides). Like I said in my session I was not slagging off Swish or any other such program, but I'm sick of repeating that point.
Now lets all have a group hug and be friends. Life's to bloody short and besides this thread is getting lost in petty squables. I'm off to bed now. Night!"


So, the case is closed. Maybe mods should take the appropriate actions?

[antigone]

David,

"Say whatever you want about me just make sure you get the spelling." Anyway, I think what as said at flash forward was in a way crap, but I hadn't really heard of swish befor the debate started so now I have and I have bought a copy of the program.

I hope all turns out for the better

[goo]

I think that the comparison to Mariah Carey is a little unfair. I would prefer to look at the big hair glam metal bands of the 80's as a better comparison.

Yes swirling text can give you a squishy feeling inside, but too often....way too often, this technique is poorly executed and does not add to the design or functionality.

Yes the swirling text etc, has its place in our flash world....but its a spice...use it sparingly!!

cheers

Goo

[flash777]

Oh my gosh...are my eyes deceiving me??? Did I really see something from Sergei on the
Swish Forum again? HALLELUJAH!!!!! :-)

Monkeypants, Relay & others: I had the same "glazed look in my eyes" trying to figure out
Flash, and Swish has opened up new Horizons for me. I'm chomping at the bit for 2.0 to come
out so I use it to finish my MAJOR CD presentation thing.

Onward...Upward...GO SWISH...GO 2.0 !!!

[diavolo]

I was not at Flash Foward 2000. But after reading the macromedia article and then seeing your presentation, it seems to me that you were trying to bash swish. Why must you be a Jakob Nielsen and try to bash a good program? It's not the program that makes bad design, it's the user. Why are you trying to stirr up the flash community and gain notoriety with a cheap shot?

Let me also add ...I have heard of Swish, but I have never until this day heard of Brendan Dawes.

Any comments?

diavolo

[philthy]

Let me also add ...I have heard of Swish, but I have never until this day heard of Brendan Dawes.

Any comments?

of course you haven't heard of Bren before, he isn't a commercially available piece of software that's advertised all over the place. have you heard of my mate Kev? no, i didn't think so. have you heard of Freehand? yes, i thought you might have done.

can you see my two extended fingers from there? no, i doubt it, but you'll get the general impression...

[davidebacci]

I'm not a professional flasher so maybe i'm missing the whole point, but it seems to me that you people can't see the wood for the trees and are getting caught up in details.
This whole criticism is just a knee jerk reaction. Swish is criticised by people who feel threatened - they realise that the former black art of cool text effects is now open to everyone and his grandma. It is the same as when I used to handcode html in notepad and then frontpage came out and then my skill set was no longer as impressive as it had been. Well this is progress and as swish opens up animated text effects for the masses, the professionals are forced to be ever mmore creative and come up with stuff that distinguishes them from the crowd. And so we all take a collective step forward and the internet progresses that bit closer along its path of development. Products like swish and swift should be commended for forcing designers to better themselves and find more creative ways of conveying their message.
Well done to all the people who put the hard work in to making these products.
Dav

[RazoRmedia]

You see bad design with swish because it is a simple program to use and the most simple text effects look good the first time round but look horrific to users used to seeing it. When Swish is used more and more and the camera tool is got to grips with, some stunning stuff can be created.

When Flash is used by someone for the first time, they make something tween from one part of the stage to another (maybe with rotation if ur lucky!) which looks pretty sh*t. Then, when they get to grips with the product, start using as, some amazing stuff can be done.

OK, lets have a look at the 2 statements above and spot the difference!

You are dissing a product that you have probably never used. OK sorry, you say you're not dissing Swish but text effects in general. Well text effects look bad when they are done by someone who is learning. Some of my work is really bad because it was when I was learning Flash. Some of your work is too, everyones in fact. This does not let you diss an effect or tool just because it is done badly. Have a butchers at http://www.purifiedproductions.com, fantastic