Introducing Swell - A flash animation tracker. Accepting more beta testers!

So I've been working on a program for flash animators (like myself and many others) and I'm pleased to say that this program is called: 'Swell'.

Wait? What is Swell?

Swell (stylised as "Swell" or "swell" ) is a flash animation tracker. It tracks and displays statistics of your animation while you're animating in Adobe Flash.

Swell is useful for creating graphs, reports or even a timeline of your animation progress.

If you haven't noticed already, Swell's logo is Edd from the online Flash cartoon 'Eddsworld'. (But I'm prety sure you NG folks already knew that!) The name 'swell' is based on the late Edd Gould's own catchphrase: "It's pretty swell"

The credit of the logo rightfully goes to Paul Ter Voorde

Swell is currently in early beta, and it's still very early days, so expect the UI to look very basic.

I promised in my last post, that I'd post screenshots:

Swell is compatible with Adobe Flash CS3. (Unlike Windows, you have to install swell manually if you have Flash CS3 for Mac)

No support for Macromedia MX 2004 or Macromedia Flash 8 yet! A port to AS3 to AS2 is needed.

Swell has an autosave feature builtin. You can adjust the save interval by using the slider.

Swell is compatible with Flash CC 2014. But not Adobe Flash CC (2015) at the moment. Thanks to Adobe killing off Extension Manager.

Windows gets support too. Swell can track your cartoon at different intervals, this one tracks each frame every minute. By default, its every 5 minutes. Swell will be able to do more than just this in a future release.

Lastly, Swell can track multiple flash projects. You can hide the flash client and Swell will be running in the background.

As I said in my last post, Swell will become free and open-source on GitHub later this year.

Swell also has a developer interface for programmers to play with, although it's too long and detailed to cover in this post.

Oh, did I forget to mention that it includes an auto updater?

If you would like to beta test Swell, you can sign yourself up here.

Once you've signed up you can take a look at the requirements before you install Swell.

If you have any questions, suggestions, tips or anything about Swell, just comment below or send me an email.

hako.

Comments

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InkClod 2015-09-05 11:51:16

Woah man, looks dope.

hako 2015-09-05 11:51:16 (Updated 2015-09-06 09:29:55)

Cheers InkClod, hoping to add more features in the coming months. I still need to throw you a buck btw.

Silverspoop 2015-09-05 14:40:18

I really, really, REALLY, want to beta test this.

Megacharlie 2015-09-05 19:07:44

Its pretty good so far! https://twitter.com/Megacharlie159/status/640299926690373633

hako 2015-09-05 19:07:44

Awesome! Great to see it working perfectly. More updates will come soon.

Psychopath 2015-09-06 05:32:54

I don't get the point. Why would I want to or care about measuring my progress like that? I'm pretty certain that I would know when and where I've made updates and made progress, mostly because I was there. Like, are there gonna be world stats to show whoever makes the most progress or something?

hako 2015-09-06 05:32:54 (Updated 2015-09-06 09:16:45)

The point of swell is that it's an animation activity tracker. Since animation takes a lot of time, it would be worthwhile to show stats of your cartoon to your audience or perhaps to people who are interested in your animation process.

For example, If you've just finished a cartoon in flash, you can see which frame you've spent the most time on, accurately know how long it took you to finish the cartoon or how many total line strokes you made etc. These are stats that you wouldn't have otherwise known while you're animating.

But for you the animator, It's really satisfying to see the evolution of a cartoon you made from start to finish using swell.

Nope, there will be no world stats. It's all private. Since you own the data you can export your stats to like, PDF, HTML or whatever.