I’ve spent the last few weeks feverishly working away on my latest website, and today it is my great pleasure to invite you to try out my new creation, effectgenerator.com. The Effect Generator is whole new way of creating Flash content online for free, within a simple but powerful what-you-see-is-what-you-get drag-and-drop graphical editing environment.
Unlike most online Flash generators, which normally configure a limited range of template effects, The Effect Generator lets you select from whole multitudes of transitions, layouts, animations and public media, so your imagination is the only limit. The site also contains a moderately-sized template library, which, aside from illustrating the power of the effect building system, also lets you rapidly configure stock effects. Once created, effects can be rapidly posted to blogs, social networks, or any custom HTML page.
Here are some example effects created with The Effect Generator:
Example 1 - Example 2 - Example 3 - Example 4
Getting Started
To try out The Effect Generator, click here. Here’s a quick 3 minute walk-through screen-cast:
Video text
Hello, welcome to effectgenerator.com - a quick way to author and publish stunning animated graphics online!
On the left-hand side of the screen, you will see a library of components. To add a component, simply click on the component and then it will be displayed in the preview pane on the top-right. In the preview pane you can drag components, rotate them and resize them as you see fit.
On the bottom-right of the screen you will see a configuration panel, where you can change, for example, the colour of the text you are dealing with, or select between a wide range of fonts.
As well as text, you can add images, either by selecting a URL, or by uploading an image directly from your computer. Likewise, these images can be dragged and resized within the preview pane itself.
There’s a library of transitions and animations, filed on the left-hand side under ‘Animations’, which can be applied to any components within the canvas. For example, if you select our text, select ‘Display Transitions’ and select ‘Scale Up, then the text will appear to grow when it is displayed. Similarly, you could add a Blur effect, and a Rotation effect. To the image, we might add a Shine effect.
Other simple components you might like to use include various simple shapes. We can add a Star to our text, and set it to fade in on display. Each transition animation can be set to last for a given length of time, as well as to occur between a given range of values.
Once your effect is complete, you can click on ‘Publish’, provide optional details about the effect, and then you will be presented with a URL that displays your effect, a URL for editing your effect, and a whole range of different plugins to post to different blogs or social networks.
The Effect Generator also comes with a range of templates that can be easily edited. For example, there are various different slideshows that can be configured individually with images uploaded from your PC, as well as a variety of different text effects. Each of these templates can either be opened directly, or added as new component in your existing canvas.
We hope you enjoy using The Effect Generator.
Technical Information
For the technically minded, The Effect Generator project is based around a new intuitive XML-embedded domain specific language for generating special effects graphic and layouts, called FXML. You can think of this as being a bit like HTML for Flash, only with the potential for much greater scalability and pluggable motion graphics effects. The most exciting features of FXML are its capacity for compositionality of stop-motion effects, and for generation via dynamic server-side scripting environments. The FXML player is a slimline flash movie (only 30k) that plays effects written in FXML code. The Effect Generator is a graphical Rich Internet Application for editing FXML, itself created in Flash.
