Tuesday 2 January 2007

Easy Flash creations with Toufee

With Toufee you can easily create Flash movies with your photos, audio and videos even though you are not a graphic expert. Toufee is a free, powerful and versatile multimedia flash creator as, in addition to movies, you can also create flash banners, flash presentations, flash e-cards, flash tickers and all this without having any knowledge of the Flash IDE or programming. Flash movies are published in Flash 7.0 to make sure that movies can run on Windows, Mac and Linux and give a good quality reproduction.


You will need to sign up to create your account: immediately after you receive a confirmation email and then you will be ready to start learning and editing.
As soon as you save a movie this becomes ready to be published over your website - almost instantly. You can view and/or share movies online using either a permanent URL, in this case Toufee will give it to you; or with embedded HTML, in this case you will have to paste on your blog or site. Thus you can publish it directly on your website and this becomes a part of it. As well as you can use Toufee’ propriety Flashbox to add the flash movies for permission based playing. Another option is publishing it inside website popups which load by clicking a link.
Currently with Toufee you can add frames, text, images, videos, notes, sounds and buttons to your movies. Some elements have over fifty different effects you can apply to your movies.
As to sound you can:
  • record your own speech for the movie (narration is always welcomed in a presentation) or you can use Toufee's advanced and natural sounding text to speech (TTS) engine.
  • add music to your movies, or better a musical loop sample of 10" to 40" that keeps repeating itself. This in order to produce smaller files, reduce bandwidth and also to avoid any distraction from the movie caused by music/lyrics.
As to speed - very relevant when it comes to Flash - movie files made with Toufee are very small. For instance a 2/3 minute/movie enriched with both music and images can reach 500kb and be uploaded quite quickly. By the way there is no limit as to the size of the movie you want to produce. Moreover, each Toufee movie is segmented and cached by the browser; this implies that once the user has played it once he will be able to watch it again very much faster. Should the user play another Toufee movie, the parts that are common to the first movie (like fonts, player and effects) will not need to be re-loaded. Since movies start playing as soon as a few bytes are loaded, the rest of the movie is loaded effortlessly in the background without nuisance for the reader.
Flash movies are used extensively in professional web pages, since they allow creating interactive presentations. E-commerce sites by providing this as an additional presentation/learning option try to increase their range of audience, and make their content more interesting and sales oriented. I consider however the use of Flash as somewhat controversial from the usability standpoint as it is often misused: for some designers use Flash on their sites replacing even the text or prepare files that take too long to download or are too intruding. If you are using Flash on your website, I always advise you to add it discerningly, and harmonizing not overflowing its content.
Naturally Adobe Flash remains a powerful and reliable designer's tool and needing lots of knowledge and experience to be used; nonetheless Toufee is a tool for everyone and its results are quite excellent considering that it is free and can be used also by an absolute beginner.

2 comments:

toufee said...

Hello Mr.Guy!
Thanks for this amazing article. I just back into office from Goa today! I am very happy that you find our site useful and are helping us in support toufee.com

Again, this was very insightful and i look forward to your questions about toufee you may have.

Thanks so much :)
Best Regards,
San.
Co-Founder Toufee.com

Guy Mc Paul said...

You are welcome! Please update me about further developments and new projects you are working at.
Good job indeed.
Guy