KoolMoves 7.0

• Can be configured to various task and skill levels.
• Allows Actionscripting and tweening.
• Has many of Flash's functions without the price.

• It is possible to be too helpful. Stop asking.
• Not particularly fond of the tabbed timeline.
• Interface is simplistic to the point of feeling broken.

• An interesting entrant into the arena of low-cost Flash alternatives.
• Offers bone systems that normally only come with much more expensive software packages.
• Prepackaged with multiple pre-created, professional-looking effects and skins.

My first impression of KoolMoves 7.0 is that it's trying a little too hard to be Flash without the Flash price - and without the development talent and complexity behind it. While it's a valiant effort that offers a great deal of useful functionality and is definitely worth the price ($49.99), it's really not keyed towards professional animators and developers. It's more a hobbyist's program with watered-down versions of standard animation software tools and an interface that somehow manages to make the simplest of processes look alien.

It does offer several interesting features, though. There are very nice skins for various objects, multiple special effects, an advanced cartooning mode, bone systems, and even wizards to walk novice users through complex tasks. Unfortunately it assumes that everyone is a novice user - and even if you set the difficulty level to Advanced when you first open the program, it still nags you constantly with several "helpful" popup windows that do nothing but annoy.

Is it a good program? No. Is it a bad one? Again, no. It's mediocre, and a matter of getting what you pay for. It's exactly what it looks like: a $49.99 version of Flash animation software that tries to be better than the original and fails. However, it shows promise, and I'd like to see where the developers take it in the future.

User Reviews