BannerZest Pro: Flash at a Fraction of the Cost

If you have ever found yourself wanting to incorporate Flash into one of your websites, you know that the de facto Flash program is Adobe’s Flash CS3. Now if you are anything like me, the price tag that comes with Flash is just a tad bit steep. During the “Feed Good Food to your Mac” promotion, I found a very nice compromise to my Flash desires, called BannerZest Pro.

BannerZest Pro from Aquafadas, is a program that makes Flash picture banners as easy a drag and drop, at a fraction of the cost. The results are quite professional, and are very simple to customize.

The first thing that BannerZest Pro asks you to do when you open it, is drag images onto its window. These are the images that will be used in your banner. If you do not have the images right in front of you to drag onto the BannerZest Pro window, you can find the images by opening the Media Browser. You can add and remove images as your please once you add the initial images to the window. Once you have a few images inside of BannerZest Pro, it’s time to start creating your banner.

BannerZest Pro consists of two windows. One window is the preview of your banner, and the other is called the inspector. The inspector has four tabs. The Media tab is where you edit the name and subtitle associated with each of your images. Themes is where you choose the theme of your banner, there are 16 themes you can use in total. Aquafadas has plans to release a theme development kit soon so you can create your own themes easily. The Settings tab is where you customize aspects of the theme you selected, and finally, the Publish tab is where you choose settings for publishing your banner to the web.

The Media tab gives you an overview of the images you are using in your banner. You can delete images by clicking on the “x” beside each image, or add more images by dragging them from the finder or media browser onto the inspector. The Media tab lets you change the title of your image used in the banner, the subtitle (which is set to the current date by default), and add a URL to open when you click on the image. You can also crop images right inside of the Media tab.

The Themes tab is pretty basic. Clicking on a theme will load it into the preview window.

The Settings tab is where the bulk of the work is done. Each theme has different parts that can be customized, so the Settings tab will be different for each theme that you use. The theme that I am using in this example is “Water Apparition.”

In this theme you can adjust the Loading Screen, Size, Border, Theme Title, Title, Subtitle, Media and Background Gradient. To adjust a parameter, just click the triangle beside the adjustment name. Once you have made your changes, click the reload button on the preview window to see your changes take effect.

The last tab in the inspector is the Publish tab. This is where you adjust the way your banner will be published. You can choose to publish it locally, or remote through FTP or .Mac. After specifying a server and a subfolder, you can choose your image quality, and the target URL. There is also an option to have your banner display in Lightbox or Shadowbox. The last step is to publish your banner!

Once your banner finishes publishing, it is quite simple to get the code to integrate your banner into your website. You can either click “Show HTML” or “Show Banner.” Clicking “Show HTML” will open up a window that gives you options to copy code depending on where you will be adding the banner. Aquafadas has created presets for publishing to programs like RapidWeaver, WordPress, and Facebook. Clicking copy to clipboard will copy the entire section of code, allowing you to paste it where you please.

Clicking “Show Banner” will take you to the place online where you published your banner, and show you a preview of what it will look like. On this page there are also the options that you saw in the “Show HTML” window, also with options to copy the sections of code to the clipboard.

Unfortunately, BannerZest Pro does seem to have trouble scaling images when you make the banner smaller than the theme default. If you look at my first example banner below, you may notice that some icons are a little blurry. The theme default is 900px across, but I had to change that to 520px to fit within the boundaries of our blog. Each icon has been scaled down from 512×512, though they look crisp and clear when the banner is 900px across.

In the time I spent with BannerZest Pro, I did find myself wishing for a few things. The inspector does not allow you to resize it yourself. Each time you select a new tab, it resizes automatically. A few times I found myself looking for ways to make it smaller to save screen space. The next thing I found, and I’m not sure if the underlying animation technology used supports this, is I wanted to be able to change the text in my banner without having to use the inspector to do it. Instead of having to click the “Theme Title” triangle in the Settings tab, it would be nice to just be able to edit the Theme Title right inside of the preview window. Having said those things, BannerZest Pro looks like a mature application, and will most likely receive added functionality in the future.

BannerZest Pro will come in handy when just trying to add a little more spice to your website. In minutes, you can create an interactive flash slideshow, or an advertisement for your product.

BannerZest Pro just came out of beta, and can be had for $129. Pick it up at the store of Aquafadas. Check back at MacApper soon, as I will have a post outlining the differences between the standard version of BannerZest, and the pro version reviewed in this post.

You can see a few banners I created with BannerZest Pro below. Clicking an icon will take you to that apps site:

Click an application name to see its icon.

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