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Company: ScreenTime Media
Price: $24.45 (Personal) & $149.95 (Professional)
Official Site
 The guys who brought us ScreenTime for Flash have come out with another product that "easily and reliably converts Flash MX or Swish .swf files into wallpaper." Now, the thought of having a dancing desktop is about as appealing to me as having a midget on my desk tap-dancing. A long time ago, I use to get excited about the intricate screensavers and search endlessly for beautiful wallpapers for my desktop. But that was before computers were nothing more than toys to me and not tools for making money.
Now, my screensaver is just a black screen and my desktop is usually a white background so I can see everything on it. So when I first of heard of the concept of SWF Desktop, I thought, "Great, another lame Flash toy."
But after reviewing it, I've had a change of heart.
Merely a tool, but a powerful one
SWF Desktop is just like Flash in the sense that it is merely a tool. It's fairly powerful, so it would be easy for people to abuse. And just like Flash, the true greatness of SWF Desktop is not measured in what advantages it will give developers, but what will developers do with the advantages.
Alone, SWF Desktop will take a SWF file, package it up, and convert into an installable program. Once installed, the SWF file will reside on the user's desktop with all the same capabilities that Flash currently has.
Opening up the program and looking at the interface, it is apparent that those accustomed to third party Flash tools will have no problems managing their way around. The program is broken up into three tabs: Content, Properties, & Installer.
On the Content tab, there is the famous drag-n-drop feature, scaling, positioning, background image/color chooser, external SWF files, and more. This tab is used to specify the look and feel of the SWF wallpaper.
Once a developer has defined their content, they can move on to set the properties. One would think that from here, you can set the "properties" of the file, but it is just to select a preview image for the user to see in the Display Properties panel in Windows.
The next part of the program is very impressive. SWF Desktop allows developers to customize the look of their installers. It's just a simple picture and text, but it's more than most programs like this offer.
From the "Installer" section, developers can also include a Read Me file that will open after installation and select a custom icon for the installer.
Once you've reached this point, just click "Build" and SWF Desktop creates an executable file. In my test, I went with a Great Wall theme. Below is a screenshot of the installer.
End user experience
There are positive and negative things to say about the experience for the end users of the new wallpapers. Installation is a piece of cake, but uninstalling the desktop is not as intuitive. The only way to get the program off of the computer is through Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel. The SWF wallpaper will appear in the list of programs under the name given to it during development.
The other problem I found is once a user changes their wallpaper from the SWF Desktop version, switching back is not easy. The SWF wallpaper appears with an Internet Explorer icon in the Desktop panel of the Display properties. Users might find it difficult at first to find their SWF wallpaper since they're not use to associating it with IE.
Poor Help Documentation
While ScreenTime Media's site offers some FAQs, the help documentation that comes with the program is poor. Nothing more than a simple text file, searching through it is not easy.
A new program like this needs decent help documentation that is easy to use, especially one that is venturing out into a new field of development.
The endless possibilities
With all that said, SWF Desktop is a very promising program. The negatives are not show-stoppers and could easily be fixed in the next release.
The possibilities are endless. The results of SWF Desktop could range from a bear in a pink tutu that tells you the time every hour to a full-blown mortgage application that notifies brokers when lenders have received and/or accepted their quote requests.
Some of the samples available on ScreenTime Media's site are not only impressive, but practical. The Live XML News Feed is something we've all seen in Flash before, but putting it on a desktop takes it to a whole new level. A user is able to add and remove XML Feeds that are then parsed and displayed on their desktop. This is extremely useful, because a user never has to open a browser to check on the latest updates for their favorite sites.
When I see stuff like this, my creative juices start flowing as I think of the different possibilities. Companies would be foolish not to start looking into this technology immediately.
Pricing and other details
SWF Desktop is only available for Windows and the user must have at a minimum the same version of Flash that was used to create the wallpaper.
Currently, the program runs for $149.95 and can be bought through ScreenTime Media's site. They also offer a personal edition for $24.95. This version has most of the customizable features disabled and is only for non-commercial, non-profit, school, or personal use. It's cheaper, but limited.
Considering the possibilities with the professional version, $149.95 is a steal. |
