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 Creating a stylish Flash-driven web site doesn't have to involve buying expensive development tools, or bulky scripting manuals. MotionArtist 2.0 replaces all the usual complexity with point-and-click animation settings and simple mouse movements, letting you create effective Flash animations in minutes.
The program comes with some useful animation templates, for instance, which provide the easiest possible way to get started. Pick the "Digital Camera Album" template, say, choose a visual style, add your photos, and MotionArtist will build the animation for you. Browse the other templates and you'll find it's just as easy to create an animated site splash screen, or a complete menu system, no Flash experience required.
If you prefer to go your own way, though, then there's always the option to create a new animation from scratch. Which starts by choosing backgrounds, buttons and objects from the built-in MotionArtist libraries, or perhaps by drawing or importing new images of your own.
Adding basic animation is just a matter of picking options from a dialog box, maybe setting up a title to fade in when the animation begins, shoot off to the right when it's done. Or if the default options aren't enough, then record the path of an object as you drag it around the screen, and MotionArtist will replay it in an animation.
There's support for interactivity, by creating clickable regions that will jump to another page in the animation (or an external web site). You can dress up the project by adding audio files, or Flash applets, then fine-control their use via a timeline. And when you've finished, click File > Create SWF to export the finished results and a matching HTML file, ready for immediate use.
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