Flash animations made nice and easy

Unless you’re an expert with Dreamweaver or Adobe Flash, you won’t be able to produce Flash animations very easily.

Luckily there are programs out there like Astro which do the hard work for you although you have to bear in mind that such programs are inevitably extremely limited compared to authoring the real thing yourself. Astro helps you to create real-time Flash text effects which you then export and import directly onto a website.

Everything is divided into different categories so first you change the background, then the foreground, then the text, then the animation and finally the font. Bizarrely throughout this demo however, you’re accompanied by a rather annoying soundtrack which sounds like some kind of countdown to lift off. In terms of effects, it’s also rather strange – you get a choice of George W Bush and The Queen for example so unless you’re planning to put a jabbering Queen or Bush on your website, Astro won’t be much use to you.

If you upgrade to the full version however, apparently you can have access to over 1250 effects so presumably there’s some more useful ones in there. The animations aren’t great and the graphics are a little substandard but it does make it ridiculously easy to make Flash animations.

Astro is no Picaso in the Flash world but it does allow you to at least create basic animations if you’ve got not Flash skills whatsoever.