Easy Animated Text
Vertical Moon’s Text-Osterone is an easy-to-use program for creating impressive animated text files in .swf or .fla (Flash) format. You can combine and customize more than 200 effects using any active font, use multiple lines of text, apply different effects to different blocks of text, and add click actions to launch Web pages or load other SWF files.
And it only costs $40.
Helpfully, it lets you specify the number of seconds the effect should take and the frame rate, so that animations take the same amount of time on any computer. It can also optionally output the result to a QuickTime movie.
The effects are impressive — I encourage you to have a look at their examples. (Perhaps you can recreate them in Quark’s Quark Interactive Designer!)
Jeff Gamet is a contributing editor for Design Tools Monthly, the executive summary of graphic design news. He is also the morning editor and reviews editor for The Mac Observer and iPodObserver.com, and contributing writer for Layers Magazine and Photoshop User. He writes the InBrief column for InDesign Magazine, and is the author of “The Designer’s Guide to Mac OS X,” from Peachpit Press
When Jeff isn’t writing about the graphic design world, he’s talking about it on the Design Tools Weekly podcast with co-host Jay Nelson. He also talks about Apple and the Mac world every week on The Mac Observer’s Apple Weekly Report.
Jeff studies, tests and reviews new software and technologies for the Macintosh community as well as the design and print industries. He is a former Pre-press specialist, and has nearly 25 years experience with computer technology. Jeff trains, lectures and consults on techniques for more efficiently using Mac OS X in creative environments throughout the country.
In the rare moments when he can get away from his MacBook Pro, Jeff spends his time climbing and biking in the Colorado mountains.