You don’t have to be a web designer to appreciate a cool web site. There are plenty of “bang-zoom!” sites out there that are loaded to the gills with movies, music and interactive elements that make you sit back in awe and whisper…wow.

But for those of you who have something MORE to say, the web provides a canvas for you to paint your own “bang-zoom!” works of art. Anyone who is anyone has a web site – and with the ever increasing presence of artists, photographers, writers and other creative types it’s getting tough to make your stuff stand out.

The answer for many is Macromedia Flash. But for the newly initiated, Flash can be a little more than intimidating. It’s a wide-open kind of creative tool, with so many powerful options it’s hard to know where to start. And then there’s the code – millions of lines of seemingly meaningless techno-babble and jargon that has to be PRECISE or it’s totally worthless. One wrong word, one tiny error, one overlooked mistake and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Tivity Software has a “cure for the common code.” Their Xtivity Flash authoring software fulfills a promise that’s right on their web site… “All of the cool. None of the code.”

Xtivity is a Flash authoring suite that uses a graphic interface to build your Flash content. It boils the code down to a simple WYSIWYG interface (What You See Is What You Get) that lets you pick elements, move them, and animate them with just a few mouse clicks. Unlike Flash itself, Xtivity works without a time-line and provides nifty pre-loaded features such as transitions, buttons and web page templates.

The software is fun and fairly easy to navigate, but that’s not to say it’s a no-brainer. The interface still feels a little heavy at times, with numerous windows cluttering the workspace. Fortunately, the whole workspace is somewhat “fluid,” letting you pull out, rearrange and reorganize everything the way you want. If you’d prefer a workspace similar to the familiar Flash environment, you can easily set that up as well. The one complaint our Flash expert and Flash novice alike had was that there were no scrollbars on the actual document area, making a casual scroll a little more difficult. The “pan” tool takes care of this problem, but anyone used to traditional scrolling bars might be a bit frustrated at first.

Tivity has taken the time to put several free “extras” on their web site - which is also accessible from the software itself. These freebies include elements such as pre-built photo viewers, movie players, animated icons for e-mail, and other handy objects. The software comes preloaded with a ton of these types of useful gizmos already, though, so it might be a while before you start looking into the free stuff (seriously!).

There is a large selection of pre-built background images, buttons, overlays, shapes…well, you get the idea. More stuff than you’ll be able to use in any one web site. But trust us, you’ll want to try!

The biggest compliment we can pay Xtivity? It’s fun! It was so easy to slap together Flash content that we could hardly call it work. And though we can see a bit of room here and there for future improvements, there’s nothing that stands out as a real “flaw” in the online ointment.

REQUIREMENTS:

Xtivity runs on Windows 98 thru XP. 256 MB of RAM is recommended (our Flash Expert recommends going quite a bit higher, around 1GB, to really get things running smooth). The software installs on 200MB of disk space and requires an internet browser of undisclosed heritage (Internet Explorer and Netscape were both used for our testing and both worked fine).

Xtivity sells online for $399 – a real bargain considering the full version of Macromedia Flash sells for around seven-hundred bucks! For the aspiring web designer (or even if you just want to make cool animations to show your friends), Xtivity is a must buy at a bargain price. Visit Tivty Software for a free trial of the suite at www.tivity.com.

Want an even BETTER deal? ViewOnline readers are getting 50% off on Tivity Software’s Xtivity through October 31, 2005! How’s that for a deal?