| A wide variety of tools for creating offline animated content |
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 FlashJester/3rd Eye Solutions |
 Creator Pro ($595) Creator Standard ($395) |
 Entertainor ($29) |
 Jugglor ($99) |
 J-Tools ($39-$99) |
 Woof ($29) |
FlashJester presents a wide variety of tools for creating offline animated content using content produced in Flash as the main offering. Unfortunately, all of these tools use the PC format only and as I have mentioned previously if you're going to create ScreenSavers you should create versions for both PC and Macintosh computers at the very least in order not to alienate your potential audience. (I've gotten into the Mac vs. PC debate here on this site before, so I'm not going to get into a debate here. I just believe in creating content for as many major platforms at possible. Which is one of the major reasons I started creating in Flash in the first place since it works in Linux, Solaris, Unix, Pocket PC and many more platforms besides PC and Mac.)
So I'm not going to talk about Creator Pro (or the lower cost Creator Standard) too much here since ScreenTime for Flash is the only tool that creates ScreenSavers for both formats and that is the only app I would recommend in that case. Instead, I'm going to concentrate on the rest of their line.
Jugglor is their major new release which creates Flash "Projectors" that do far more than the usual Projector you export from Flash. For those who don't know what Projectors are these are executable files that allow you to create content for offline presentations. Indeed, I've used Projectors in place of PowerPoint presentations since they provide better overall animation and type layouts than PowerPoint allows (not to mention I don't have to learn another program.)
With Jugglor, you can create Password-Protected Projector Files and show your files in a custom-made window that you can set the size and area of the screen you want the projector to appear exactly on-screen when the movie plays. You can also decide whether the projector window is draggable or not. You can also customize whether you want a title bar in the window or not and even decided what you want the title bar to say or even what the icon should look like.
Besides that, you can actually tell the projector which additional SWF files to load and it adds these other files to the main file and calls them up when needed. This is a great feature that really adds versatility to the file.
In addition, FlashJester offers a suite called J-Tools that add even more options to the Jigglor created projector. J-Shapor allows you to use a shape as a mask and create a projector file in whatever shape you desire. You're no longer stuck in a rectangular world! J-Printor allows you to add print functionality to your projector while J-Avi allows you to insert video files in your projector. Yes, you can add video to your Flash movies! Unfortunately, you're stuck using only AVI files instead of the more popular MPEG and QuickTime files. That's pretty limited considering you don't hear much about AVI anymore vs. the newer formats like MPEG4 or Real or Windows Media. This was a good idea when it first came out but now using tools like Flix to convert various video formats to Flash.....is this really necessary?
Entertainor is also a ScreenSaver conversion app, but with a difference. What Entertainor does is take your projector files and plays them as a ScreenSaver but not for distribution on the web. Just on your local Hard Drive. I know a number of freeware and shareware apps that do the same thing for the most part so I don't think paying for a program is really a good idea in this case.[an error occurred while processing this directive]
The last item in the FlashJester catalog is called Woof and it's pretty interesting because it allows you to easily download SWF files from various websites for easy accesibility to play offline from your cache. Yes, I realize that you could just create a text file and download SWF's from a link in that text file to your hard drive, but it's usually only the one that you find out in the code and when you try to play it offline it usually cannot link to other areas because they are trying to load up other SWF movies using the loadMovie command and you don't know what names they are. (Actually, if you get the ActionScript Viewer from Buraks, you can find that out.) This is a pretty cool feature and a pretty affordable application. One of the better ones that FlashJester has released.
In FlashJester's case, I must their current product line as of this writing (January 2002) is basically a hit and miss. Many of the product have not been updated in awhile (some of the programs actually emphasize the fact that they were updated to work with Flash 4 if that tells you anything.) and as I mentioned before I can only recommend one ScreenSaver tool at this time, and that's ScreenTime since it's allows you to make both PC and Mac ScreenSavers whereas Creator Pro and Entertainor only work with the PC.
On the other hand, I think that Jugglor is a very promising tool that hopefully will be updated once Flash 6 is released and J-Tools is also has very useful features for Projectors like Priniting Capabilities and Video even though only AVI is the only format in use right now. If they add Quicktime and MPEG it would have definitely ranked higher in my review as a must.
If you do get one app from the FlashJester catalog, get Woof. It's affordable and it allows you to download SWF's very easily.
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