What is the history of Swish? Just curious...

[johnie]

I know that David Michie had something to do with it and the Open SWF project that he had going but out of curiosity what exactly is the history of Swish?

[swish_JB]

You asked for it - long winded history of Swish, and incidently quite a few other Australian tools along the way.

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A long time ago, I worked for an Australian multimedia company known as Harrow Media, as a multimedia programmer. It started out in John Collingwood Smiths house, but grew large, and we wound up occupying a large building in Balmain, Sydney, Australia.

The first programmer there, Rob Stewart, had somehow winkled out majority ownership of the production tool used to put together the presentations, inspite of being paid to develop it as a fulltime programmer. In any case after various lawyer to lawyer discussions, Formula Graphics was born. The owners of Harrow Media, John and Adam Rigby, wound up minority owners of Formula Software.

Rob convinced a somewhat younger but still loud shirt wearing David Michie that programming for Macromedia in the US was last years news, and that he'd be better off working for half the money in Australia. As any Australian will tell you - lifestyle is better than money anyday Or perhaps thats just Robs ability to talk it up. David came over here to write a java player for Formula Graphics.

However no matter how good FG was or wasn't, it didn't really sell as a multimedia tool. If you had a company structured around it, its production efficiency was staggering, but as the poor mushroom who had to struggle through years of bugs, I can attest to its ugly flipside.

Anyway, David came to the conclusion that FGs sales were always going to suck, and wrote for formula software the 1cool button tool. This created java applets to do nice interactive rollover type buttons on websites, that thing sold like hotcakes - and it still does sell to this day.

Amusingly enough, I specifically remember disagreeing with David on the name for the tool (whenever someone disagreed on a tech point at that time, I was often the one called in for an opinion). He wanted something that started with A at the least, so that it appeared earlier in the java lists, and I (and everyone else) thought the existing name - web button wiz, was good and it wouldn't make a difference, and changing the name would just confuse people. David ran a comp to find another name, and a very smart customer came up with 1coolbuttontool, which put it fair smack at the top of all the java lists. Hey presto the sales quadrupled

Around mid 97, Rob gave up on formula graphics, as a code base it had grown too large and buggy to fix anymore. He started on - and yes this name may ring bells - mofo - a ground up replacement for formula graphics. This dragged, and dragged and dragged. it went from a multimedia engine to a games engine along the way. As a result 1cooltool was the only thing that kept that company afloat. Rob moved to Byron bay to work on mofo, and David was faced with completely designing, writing and marketing a 1cool 2, as he had, continuing to more or less fund Rob, or striking out on his own.

At that time, I'd since left Harrow media, (it had been bought out by an Advertising agency and filled with horrible agency type people), and was working elsewhere for a co part owned by JCS. (I still do that for a day job as it turns out). Anyway, David started hinting to me via email that he wanted to strike out, and vector was where he wanted to go. Java became problematic, as the more features you add to an editor the larger the applet got, and the VMs remained consistently poor - especially netscapes. I guessed that he meant flash, and I knew immediately it was a killer idea. Around this time, as flash had only just been opened, the information on the format was still very scarce, so David had started working on resolving the documentation issues. I know David had openswf type information on his ISP home page, but I'm not sure whether he registered the openswf.org domain or whether he took over its running from someone else.

With both David and me pushing, John was an easy convert. He had never actually made any money from Formula software in about 4 years, in any case - despite the good sales of the button tool, and given that mofo was years away, and at the time looked like a non starter anyway. We convinced him to pull his money out of FS, and create a new company DJJ with us. This was I think at the start of 99.

just as an aside, Rob sold the rest of formula software to Adam - the other minority owner of FS, and took full ownership of Mofo. Thus Adam has wound up owning the sales rights to Formula Graphics, and outright ownership of the 1cooltool. Unfortunately he hasn't bothered to hire someone to work on the 1cooltool, and thus its time has probably passed by.

David started work on Swish. We tried out lots of names etc, and eventually David came up with Swish (yes he is the brains of the company!). The original idea of Swish was to be a low cost easy to use editor.

As it turned out, two things happened. One - everyone who had flash started trying to get text to fly around their pages, hand tweening was how animators spent their weekends, and two, creating a good editor first up proved impossibly difficult and beyond what David could do with the time and money we had available. David convinced us both, (and believe me I took some convincing - but at times it just pays to believe David), that text effects was what the world needed.

Remember at that time, there was no live motion, no flashtyper, no nothing except for flash and generator, and generator clones, and the odd 3D plugin/program beta, not even koolmoves had surfaced, so you could understand my scepticism.

Thus mid project - I guess around October/November 99, we changed direction with Swish and headed towards text effects. It didn't take long from there to go to 0.01 of the product, which was released via the openswf site. David did also work for middlesoft briefly on the sdks and documentation etc (Middlesoft were doing this for macromedia) - after all by that stage, who knew more about .swf than David, and that helped us keep the company in the black when we'd run down the money supplying David with beer and chips.

We went from there to 0.06 pretty quickly - I think that it was available around feb 2000, and we started accepting registrations at $20US as an introductory offer. Harrow Productions (not to be confused with the more or less defunct Harrow media), helped us with the site and logo design (Susannah did a great job of this).

I put together a minimal backend to the site - the support site etc - and we were off and running. O.99 followed then 1.0. By 1.0 we had at least automated the sales process with BMT, and I wasn't just making up all the licences by hand. David went to flashforward (I think it was in SF), and was cheered for showing exploding text. The sales took off, and from then on, we've been self sufficient.

For flashkit in NY, we decided we wanted images and sound to be ready (David works best to a deadline), and we (well David!) got sound done before it, and images during. I got on the plane to NY with notebook that didn't have an ethernet connection (doh) or modem, so I couldn't get updates on it. Nor could I get the proper presentation on there, thus my presentation at NY kinda sucked. I guess I just suck at adlib.

Around that stage the co was reasonably secure financially so we decided to risk hiring and put the sales money back in to new features, rather than doing the cash in thing. We finally replaced Davids long suffering 266 and its flickery screwy monitor (if you only saw what he had to work with!). As you guys may know these days, good programmers are damn expensive, and it was pretty scary commitment decision to hire people who's salaries would easily add up to as more money than as we'd made in revenue at the time, but its a decision that is clearly going to work out, especially when you see the way Swish 2 is coming along.

I'd been doing the support emails myself after my day job and after 4 months of 7 day, 14 hours a day weeks, I couldn't do it anymore. We hired Andrew to do support, and we hired Hungsin, a gun programmer with previous vector editor experience. Also an amazingly smart and dedicated programmer. David often gives him vague half baked instructions, for which David expects half baked results, and often gets back perfectly thought out perfectly engineered results. Example, David said something along the lines of - maybe we should do a chinese version. The day after Hungsin has fully translated Swish to chinese

After this I guess we are getting into recent territory. We also hired Roger, who has a wide background in UI programming, and is now a regular poster on the forum. I think the struggle to get Swish 2's UI going was hard, new and old code took time to get it all together, and we weren't certain about Roger at first, but he has definately come through with the goods.

The fact that we started Swish as an editor, and that it worked like an editor, I believe has always been key to its popularity, even in the current version, there is always a little more to discover, a little more you can do with it. Thats where the future of Swish lies (though of course effects - text or otherwise, will always be a big part of its make up).

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the epilogue I guess of this strange tale, is of course the tale of Rob Stewart. Mofo the multimedia engine became Mofo the game engine, Mofo the game engine sat on the shelf for a while whilst Rob wrote his book on religion (I don't know whether he has got a publishing deal yet). I'm still good friends with Rob, and we went to the pub a lot at that time, and talked a great deal about existence, and of course played a lot of pool. Pool is excellent endless material for metaphysics and religious discussions by the way, its sort of life and engineering in microcosm.

Eventually sanity returned and perhaps with a touch of schadenfrude (sorry if its spelt wrong, my german sucks), Mofo the game engine became Mofosofts insane flash animator, and it has *finally* shipped. I don't see too much of Rob at the moment, so I've no idea whether its going well for him or not.

cheers

jason
-swish support

[johnie]

Thanks!!!

[sog_webmaster]

I used to use 1Cool Button Tool!!! I didn't know David M worked on that! Awesome!

[johnie]

I think David inhearted Open SWF from Troy Gilbert. This is making an interesting little reaserach project. It was Dave, Bob Hartzell, Debon, Shrag, and a couple of others who originally expanded the SWF documentation. If I could only find someone from the ground zero project it would make an interesting article.

[sog_webmaster]

Article for what?
That'd be a cool project to report on but I sure none of my class will require a report on how a program got started anytime soon!
over and out for the night.

[velez]

You have answered many questions lingering in the minds of Swish users. Thank you for sharing it with us. It's nice to see the evolution of Swish in paper.

[johnie]

Originally posted by sog_webmaster
Article for what?
That'd be a cool project to report on but I sure none of my class will require a report on how a program got started anytime soon!
over and out for the night.

Someone in the open SWF Project is needing info on the Project. David Michie, the other people in the swiff newsgroup, and Swish were instramental in this project. Swish was the first lowcost alternative to Flash to really take off.