14 DAY TRIAL // The world of special effects is fascinating. You get to create cool illusions contrived to leave a deep impression in the mind of the viewers. And with all the majestic development of technology, things could only get better with this domain. Computers offer the most amazing ways to ease your work and at the same time produce out-of-this-world effects.
FX goes to the most superficial level and can be found on almost any website today. It is employed in creating movie clips, for embellishing text, distorting images etc. And with the growing popularity of special effects, the softwares that help in creating them also multiplied.
Adobe is one of the major providers of effects for the web by means of its top notch products (both money-wise and quality-wise). But it seems that it cannot cover all the imagination of its users. So extensions have been developed by third party developers and implemented in their applications. And for Flash there are a myriad of other softwares designed to provide you with cool effects.
NasserFX is an easy way to make neat Flash text effects and save them for embedding them in your websites. The application is developed to customize your text with all sorts of effects for free and with the least effort from your part.
The time to apply the desired effects to your text is minimum as all there is to the job is inputting the text, choosing the effect, compile it if you need a preview and save it to your computer. Sounds easy and it really is. Of course, additional settings like changing the background and text color can be made with the same comfort.
The interface is quite simple and displays all the settings up front, with no additional windows for you to get lost in. The application screen is split into two sections. In the upper part, there are the settings for configuring the texts, define the link to a web page and define the background and text color.
You can insert multiple lines of text to add the effect to. These will be displayed consecutively and for each of them the same effect will be applied. The maximum limit of text lines you can insert is five and you can define the position of X/Y and the size. The position goes both on positive and negative values, so you can move the text to whatever location you want.
The settings window also includes a Link area to provide the link to be opened when clicking on the flash and a link to jumped to immediately after the effect is over. The trouble is that the pages will open automatically in Internet Explorer, regardless of your default web browser.
A little to the right, there are the fields for defining the target, the number of loops to be run, the background color and the text color. Loop option is set by default to zero value. That means that the effect will be played endlessly and the links will not be accessed unless you click on the window.
Regarding the color changing options, these may not seem too easy to handle because you will need a color code in order to change it. This cannot be achieved internally and a third party application is required.
The menu bar contains three choices: File, Effects and Help. File incorporates only Exit function (which in Vista does not work), Help includes the About option and Effects is the core of the application as it integrates a list of 56 effects for you to pick from.
All the entries are alphabetically ordered for easy access. However, this means that you have to learn their names in order to go to the right one. Among the most good-looking of them there is the "Bullit" effect which kinda looks like "Blinds" but they are not the same. "Flare" and "Fence" effects should definitely be checked out as you're in for something special. Of course, out of the 56 effects available there will be some to suit your needs for sure. They are not elaborate and complicated; they just comply with the "looking good" requirements.
For a preview of the effects, take a look at the Preview window in the lower part of the screen. The trouble here is that the preview will be for the developer's settings, that is every time you want to see an effect into action you will have to hit "Compile and See" button. Or you can edit the TXT files in the software installation folder, under "effect lib" directory. You can define there all the five text lines as well as their parameters.
The Good
Extremely easy to use and free, Nasser FX is a good helper in tuning your text with some effects. The application is stable enough and I am sure that it won't give you any trouble, no matter how inexperienced you are.
The Bad
Every time you want to preview an effect, the software will display the default settings and parameters and not with the changes made by the user.
The effects are ordered alphabetically which means that you must know the name of the effect you want to use in order to quickly find it. It would have been better if the alphabet were replaced by categories.
The user cannot customize the effects in any way. From this point of view, the software is WYSIWYG and there is nothing you can do to change it.
The Truth
All these being said, if you are ever in need of a Flash text effect, do not hesitate to check out NasserFX. It can provide you with a neat effect very fast.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
