FvReader

FvReader is a low-cost tool for creating electronic brochures in SWF (Flash) format, suitable for web-based information sheets or promotional material, or for mobile presentations from your laptop. If you can use a text editor, you should be comfortable using FvReader.

If you have ever been in the situation where you need to put together a basic electronic brochure or slideshow that will play back reliably on the widest range of PCs (Windows, Macintosh, Linux and many hand-held devices), and don't want to have to set up a full- blown Flash "movie" (involving importing media, setting up keyframes, channels, scripts and behaviors using Macromedia's Flash authoring environment), then FvReader could be what you're after.

Take a look at this excellent tutorial on how to put together a simple slideshow in Macromedia Flash and compare the effort required in FvReader:

It may appeal to those who'd never consider using a large-scale multimedia authoring tool such as Flash MX, or perhaps it could be a handy companion tool for knocking up those simple slideshows and brochures without having to deal with timelines and scripting.

Putting together a presentation is just a matter of typing text directly into the layout (or copying and pasting formatted text from another program such as Word, Wordpad, or an HTML editor) and dragging pictures (from folders or your desktop) into the position you want them in the layout area (the main window of the application).

You then add a few shapes such as lines, highlight boxes or gradients (background shapes are particularly useful for magazine-style "breakout boxes").

For a little extra impact you can specify "entrance" animations for your text or images, and transition effects for page changes. While FvReader is not intended as an animation tool (alongside Flash MX there are some excellent frame-based animation programs on the market, such as Swish), it was considered appropriate to at least provide Powerpoint-style animations for bullet points etc. So rather than thinking about timelines and keyframes, you simply click on an item and specify the name of the effect and when it starts (relative the the beginning of the page's appearance) in seconds.

Then add extra pages with the click of a mouse button. When you click the "Export SWF" button, navigation controls are automatically inserted into your slideshow, and a containing HTML page is generated along with the Flash-format file, which will play back in most modern PCs (only Flash version 3.0 is required, ensuring maximum compatibility across operating systems and browser versions).

Effects such as drop shadows, transparency and animations are available with a minimum of effort and require little or no technical expertise. If you've used a word processor, an HTML editor or Powerpoint, then you're ready to go. If not, just follow the 10-minute tutorial to get started.