A Swift Introduction to Swish

What is Swish?

Swish is a companion to Flash. You can use it to learn about Flash concepts with a little bit of poking around. Swish 1.5 makes Fash movies, which can be embedded in web pages and played through the Flash Player plug-in, now included in most browsers. A limited form of Swish 1.5 is available free.

Getting the program

The Swish 1.5 demo is available free from http://swishzone.com. The demo will work forever, but it has some limitations: you can create Swish movies which look and sound fine within the Swish player, but when they are exported to a web browser, the text is changed to nonsense and sounds are muted.

Full Swish 1.5 is available for $30. An upgrade to version 2, which looks much more elaborate, will be available this Friday, June 13, for $14.95 if you own Swish 1.5. (I don't know what the full Swish price will be if you wait to buy it.) A free 30 day trial for Flash 5 is available from the Macromedia web site, www.macromedia.com. A shrink-wrapped copy at the Bookstore is xxx.xx. If people are interested in a group purchase, contact Tracey Schmidt at the ITS Software Office (5-6069, tracey-schmidt@uiowa.edu). She has arranged group buys before, at a price around $xx.xx for license and media.

The program interface


Insert Scene	Play Movie	Export to SWF
Insert Text	Play Scene	Test In Browser
Insert Image	Stop Movie

Studying Swish animations

In the Samples menu, select promo.swi
Play the movie by clicking the Play Movie icon, then stop animation by clicking Stop Movie icon.

Note the six scenes listed, and the three Text items in Scene 1

Play Scene 1 by clicking the Play scene icon, then Stop Movie
Display Scene 1 Timeline by clicking Timeline tab

Note the frame numbers at the top, the Effect names for each object, and the scroll bar at the bottom

Examine effect properties by right-clicking the effect name ("Squeeze"), select Properties, click Preview then Stop, change properties, try again
Examine other scenes
Preview movie by clicking Preview in Browser to see how Swish demo protects itself.

Study other samples

Making a Swish movie

In the File menu, select New (and don't save changes in previous example)
Insert a Text object by clicking Insert Text, then clicking the Text tab, and typing a phrase ("My first words"), styling the text, etc
Play Movie to see the results; Stop Movie to allow it to be edited
Position the text in the sample window by dragging it to the desired location
Add an effect, by clicking the Timeline tab, and then the Add Effect button
Select an effect ("Wave"), then set the effect properties (with appropriate previews to see what you're doing)
Provide an end to the scene, by clicking in Scene 1 timeline on a frame after the Wave effect, then click Actions tab and select Stop
Add a URL action to the text, by clicking the text effect in the scene timeline (Wave), then clicking the Actions Tab
Click Add Action, then select desired action (Go to URL)
Type in the URL (http://www. uiowa.edu)
Test in Browser to see the results

Summary

A movie is a sequence of scenes
Scenes contain objects
Scenes have a timeline
Objects have effects and actions associated with them on the scene timeline
Actions have a triggering event, and a resulting behavior