Real People Reviews: BannerZest Pro

Posted by Daniel East Feb 5, 2008 at 5:33am

After being totally impressed and amazed by the quality and the ease of use from the latest release by Aquafadas, makers of PulpMotion (my most favorite slide show creation software titles), here is a first look at their new BannerZest Pro title.

You do not need Flash installed nor any knowledge of digital animation to use BZp—which was, by the way, a winner of a 2008 Macsimum Macworld Award—and the results, even in beta, are very impressive. Create the “cover flow” look or the very smooth “Water Apparition” style for a truly unique and nearly effortless animated presentation, to name just a few.

Essentially, you select a group of images, drag them into the designated area, and select your theme – that’s it! Incredible Quartz-based animations with settings for iLife and .Mac integration are all part of what makes this such a standout application in both the standard and professional versions; however, and if you have the need, the latter includes the ability to use a media browser and offers integration with Apple’s Aperture professional image management software. Further, the pro version of BZp gives you the ability to add clickable links to your images to create a unique masthead animation or more interactive content for your website, presentation or even a MySpace page.

This application is not just easy, it’s fun. Trying themes and layouts is fast and making it work is really easy. A favorite feature is that your final export function also opens your browser to provide you with the copy/paste code you need to post your creation. There is so much more to talk about with this great new application, but that will have to wait until the full “gold master” version is released.

BannerZest costs US$129 for a single license and $199 for a five-user “family pack.” You can upgrade from the standard version to the pro version for $80.

Minimum system requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later, Flash Player 9.0.47 or later.

Macsimum Rating: 10 out of 10

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

  Advanced Search

Article Information

Comment on this Article Print this Article Email this Article Digg This

Contributor

Recent Articles