Ever since the release of Toufee Pro, the online flash movie maker pplication has gone through a number of major and minor changes. One such major change was the migration to online video conversion , i.e. where you simply submit your flash movies to be converted to AVI format (via Publish -> Export to YouTube option), a process which replaced the old Toufee Desktop Convertor program. There are a lot of improvements on the “backend” as well; we’ve extended video codecs support so you will no longer have any issues with your video files uploaded to Toufee and also the Text effect engine has undergone a major overhaul. On the SWF front, there were a number of improvements to the core SWF builder engine. So all in all, the Toufee Pro moviemaker is now much more improved in architecture and scalability.

That’s just a glimpse of what we’ve done to improving Toufee flash movie maker application in the past few months, but are a lots of other updates which I’ll cover in my future posts. All right, I can sense what you are wondering. What about the post? How do we create flash movies with a manual replay option? Well, for those of you who do not know about the auto-loop that Toufee supports, here is how you enable it for your Toufee flash movie. Select Movie -> Movie Play Settings -> Movie Stops Playing -> Never (Rewind and Restart Play)

This is a nice feature to have, but something better would be the option like Click to replay option, the users viewing the flash movie could use to replay the flash movie if you want. Though this option is not built-in (for the right reasons, since its easy to create this manually),  here is how you can add manually this option to the flash movies that you create with Toufee.

1.  Open your flash movie in Toufee, and select the last frame to display it in the moviemaker stage

2. Switch to the last frame of your flash movie and add a text object with the text “Click to replay”

3. With the “Click to replay” text selected, selected the Advanced tab from the Left Panel, expand Link To - Website / Email option as shown below

4. In the Link To dropdown list select Frame as the option and for the Frame # dropdown list, select Frame1 (or the first frame in your movie).

5. Click Save button to save the changes and replay the movie.

That its, you now have a custom replay text (or a button) to replay your Toufee flash movies. You no longer have to worry about creating flash movies but not having a manual replay option, for now you know how.

Till next post,

Ganesh

The Problem

Quite a few Toufee customers have reported that they did not see any of the changes that they saved in the previous session. Customers have experienced this issue even though they have saved their Toufee flash movies properly using File -> Save or the Save option (on the top-right of the MovieMaker window). After a few tests, we traced down this problem to an issue with browser caching, a technique which Toufee MovieMaker extensively uses to improve application performance.  Though all of the changes made by customers to their flash movies are actually being saved, the reason they did not see the changes the next time they logged on was because they were looking at the “cached” version of their movies which lead to thinking that they actually lost their work. The actual fact is that none of the work was lost but because of this caching technology, they were looking at the “older” version of their flash movies.

The Solution

The simple solution to the problem is to clear the browser cache and relaunch Toufee. Customers should then be able to see all the changes that they saved in their last session.  For detailed instructions on clearing your browser cache, please refer the following page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_your_cache

If you are an old member of Toufee and have used Toufee Classic (i.e. Toufee 1.0 version) to create your movies, then you might wonder where all those movies have gone since the introduction of Toufee Pro version. Worry not, for all your old “Toufee Classic” movies are very much intact if you have upgraded your membership to a paid subscription. As a special bonus, all paid members will have access to both the current Toufee Pro version plus the Toufee Classic version at no extra charge (you actually get two softwares for the cost of one and what’s more, Toufee Classic is fully-functional as ever).

As mentioned earlier, paid members can access all old Toufee Classic movies by clicking on the Toufee Classic link in the “HomePage” after you login to Toufee Pro as shown in the attached screenshot below

Clicking on the Toufee Classic link opens the much familiar Toufee Classic version where you can access all your old flash movies.

 

You can actually still do a whole lot of things with the old Toufee Classic version. Toufee Classic is fully-functional which means you can edit all your old Toufee Classic movies, and republish them to your blog or to popular sites like MySpace, Hi5, Blogger etc.

You might wonder why are we still keeping Toufee Classic in production? The reason being that we wanted to give all our old members the time to be able to smoothly transition over to the new Toufee Pro version. Also, we are porting few of the old effects from Toufee Classic version over to the new Toufee Pro and we would like to keep Toufee Classic running till such time we fully migrate to Toufee Pro. Besides, some old members are still getting used to the plethora of features packed in Toufee Pro, so we thought we would give them a breather to switch over

Ganesh
Toufee Support

If you had read my previous article on downloading Toufee flash movies as SWF, I would have mentioned that it was one of the top requested features of Toufee Pro (i.e Toufee 2.0 version). So, what was the most requested feature (and it still is)? You guessed it right, its uploading Toufee flash movies to YouTube

Download Toufee Pro (Convertor)
Before you can upload your Toufee flash movies to YouTube, you have to convert them to “compatible” video formats (AVI, MOV, MPG) that YouTube supports. We’ll this takes a lot of time and a lot of steps and patience to get this done all yourself. So we developed a standalone tool called Toufee Pro (Convertor) that fetches the movies from your Toufee Pro account, converts it into a video file that you can then upload to YouTube.

How to get the Toufee Pro (Convertor)?
Its just a click away - simply select the Export to YouTube option from the Publish menu and you are ready to go. Once you select the option, you’ll be presented a dialog window (shown below) from where you can directly download the Toufee Pro Convertor. The installation package is around 3.5mb and should download in no time. Installation is a pretty simple process and should you be up and running in no time.

Converting movies using Toufee Pro (Convertor)
Once downloaded and installed, you have to login to Toufee Pro Convertor using your Toufee account login ID and password. On successful login, all your movies created using Toufee Pro will be listed. Select a movie and the conversion process will immediately begin (as show in the screenshot below).

You might also see the Downloading Media Files message (as in the below screenshot) showing up after the conversion process is complete.

Once the conversion process if fully complete (i.e. including the Downloading Media Files process), yo’ll be prompted to save your Toufee flash movie file. The flash movie now gets saved as a .AVI file on your PC, but that is not all, there are still a few steps left to upload your movie to YouTube. Once your movie is saved to your hard drive, you’ll now be presented the YouTube upload screen

Here is where you enter a suitable description for your flash movie. You also enter Tags or keywords that allow your movie to be searched by other YouTube users. Make sure your description is comprehensive enough and your keywords closely relate to the content of your flash movie. You also select the Category of your movie in the above section. After completing all the details, click on Upload to YouTube button and you’ll immediately notice a popup message. Click OK.

A browser window then opens bringing up the following YouTube page

Click Allow Access button. In the following screen, you’ll be asked to login to your YouTube account. Enter your login details and once you login to your YouTube account, Toufee Pro convertor starts uploading the converted movie to your account. You’ll be able to view the progress as shown below.

That’s it. Once the upload is complete, you’ll find the new flash movie in your YouTube account. Please note that this involves quite a few steps and you’ll notice that it will take a while to convert depending on the size of your flash movies. The speed also depends on your internet bandwidth as Toufee Pro Convertor downloads your movie, converts it into a video file, uploads the file back to YouTube, all of these involve lot of data to be transfered to and fro Toufee and YouTube servers. So its imperative that you are on a good internet connection to avoid delay or timeout issues.

I know it was a long wait for thousands of users who wanted to upload their Toufee flash movies to YouTube, but not any more now!

Ganesh

One of the top features of Toufee Pro is the ability to download the flash movies as SWF file to the PC so that users can keep a copy of their work offline. This was a feature request that we regularly happened to get ever since we started work on Toufee Pro. We’ve finally got this incorporated into Toufee Pro and it just takes a couple of clicks to get your flash movie downloaded to your PC as SWF file.

Where is this option?
You’ll find the option under the Publish menu - select Export to Flash (Standalone SWF) and you are ready to go!

A few pointers though…
There are a few things that I would like you to look into to finish it up nicely. Firstly, open the Toufee movie by selecting File -> Open Existing. Let’s quickly look at some options.

Set Movie Size
Make sure have set the Movie Size to the ideal dimension. You can set this option from the Movie menu (Movie -> Movie Size). If you are making a presentation, you would ideally want to have a bigger in which case you chose HiDef (640×480). If you are simply publishing it to the web, or hosting it on your website you have two choices - you can either go for the Set Custom Size (ideal for creating banner flash movie for your website) or choose the Video (320×240). There is also the Web Page (800×600) option but let me keep it on hold for a while as I will be covering that in my future post.

Set Movie to AutoStart
All Toufee flash movies are set to autostart by default, however, if you had selected the Paused at Start option, you might want to change it back to autostart since when you are saving your flash movie as SWF you’d ideally want them to start playing automatically. You can set your movie to Autostart by selecting the Automatically after load of the Movie Starts Playing option under Movie menu (Movie -> Movie Starts Playing -> Automatically after load).

Configure Player Skin/Controls
Again, since you are saving your flash movie to an SWF file, you’d rather prefer not to have player controls (Pause/Stop buttons, timing bar, volume control), which is fitting if you are publishing the SWF file to your website or would just like to keep it stored on your PC.
Select Hide Players / No Controls of the Player Skin / Controls option under the movie menu (Movie -> Player Skin/Controls -> Hide Players/No Controls).

I can guess that most of you are raring to go and download your flash movies as SWF. Hope you enjoy making flash movies with Toufee. Have fun!

Ganesh

Hi

To all those Mac users, I assume you probably had problems uploading files (i.e. images/audio/video) to Toufee from your Mac.

Worry not, as we’ve now come up with a new way to upload particularly for Mac users. First of all, clear your browser cache to load the latest version of Toufee (clearing cache loads Toufee afresh from our servers). Open the Toufee Movie Maker (opens in a popup window). Now when you click on the Upload button on the right panel, you’ll find a new button called Trouble Uploading? button (please refer to screenshot below). This is an HTML uploader that we created for users who weren’t able to upload previously in Mac.

Hope this helps. If the problem still persits, please raise a support ticket via the Support Desk.

Ganesh

Imagine a product that takes evolves with ideas from thousands of minds - the result is a near perfect product that works flawlessly. Asking users what they want is far more effective than brainstroming sessions in swanky conference halls with little end-user participation. At Toufee, we believe in keeping things simple and what better way to give users what features they want than to directly ask them? So if you think there’s something you wish to see in Toufee you can directly post your suggestions at www.toufee.com/wiki

Posting suggestions at Toufee Wiki requires that you create a user account and creating an account takes less than a minute. Also, its better this way because each one of us can know who posted what.

I’ve already created a base list of sugggestions or features requests to start with and you can easily and quickly work on those to add your own suggestions. If for any reason you find trouble adding your ideas to Toufee Wiki, you can email them to me at ganesh@toufee.com and I would post onto the Wiki on your behalf.

Thanks
Ganesh

Its difficult to comprehend the features of Toufee 2.0 in one post. This is my third post and still I have a huge list of new features that Toufee 2.0 brings to simply flash movie making. Toufee 2.0 boasts of 75 new features that instantly turn you into a pro at creating flash movies. Why Toufee 2.0? If you had a look around whats happening around the technology side of Flash, you would be amazed at the pace at which new technologies overshadow their old counterparts. Toufee 2.0 brings the best of these latest developments in Flash technology to your desktop. With Toufee 2.0, we take you to experience flash movie making one step further - from simple effects to advanced flash movie creation, timing control, templates and a whole lot of exciting features that will allow you to create flash movies, the professional way - and hey not to forget - Toufee 2.0 is just as simple as Toufee 1.0, maybe even better!

Here is another quicklist of new features that you can expect to see in the new Toufee 2.0 (this is not the entire list, read my last few blogposts on Toufee 2.0 so that you can get an idea of all the features)

• New wizards that quickly allows you to create flash movies, flash websites and flash catalogues
• Masking and Shape Tweening
• Enhanced and easier time control and navigation 
• Animated buttons (e.g. rollover effects), improved Frame control and support for music notes
• New graphic and gradient elements on all objects
• Bitmap effects
• Option to create Inline Slideshows easily within your flash movie

This is my third post on Toufee 2.0, so before you start reading this article, I would recommend that you read my first post on Toufee 2.0 features and also the second.

There is something about Toufee 2.0 that I would like to share. As you maybe aware, Toufee 1.0 is hardly months old and we are already ready with the next big release. Too quick an upgrade? When we just finished work with Toufee 1.0, Adobe came up with the big news of Flex SDK which completely changed how Flash movies and Flash as a technology would be evolve in the years to follow. Immediately, the Toufee team set into action. While Adobe is working on Flex, we keep in synchronization so that Toufee works on the latest technology (mind you Flex is still in beta, but with Toufee you have a working Flex product ready for release). When released (very soon), Toufee will be among the first few products that is a full-fledged Flex application. So next time, when the folks at Adobe are ready with their next technology, we’ll be ready with a finished product and you can experience it live at Toufee.com

Ok now to a million-dollar question, what is the release date of Toufee 2.0? Watch out this space, I’ll let you know very soon

Ganesh
Toufee Support

This post is a continuation to my earlier post on Toufee 2.0 features and the new cutting-edge effects of Toufee 2.0, the free online flash movie maker. As I mentioned, there’s a long list of new features that make Toufee 2.0 a special version and a compelling upgrade.

Toufee 2.0 is more than creating flash movies and flash videos. We got rave reviews about Toufee 1.0 version and how its a heavy application (if one goes by the number of features) for an online tool. Well then, Toufee 2.0 might well be even bigger! Here’s a list of what you can expect to see in the new flash video maker

New Xbox-style UI
Expect to see a sleek and a refreshing UI in Toufee 2.0. The interface holds seemlessly integrates the sophisticated Toufee 2.0 flash movie maker engine with the flashy and trend Interface buttons, smooth window transitions that will give users a cool Xbox feel!

Save flash movies to YouTube
Saving flash movies to YouTube was one option that users had always emailed us about. Infact, this was a frequent query to Support and most users were mad about having this option. No more queries…its official, Toufee 2.0 will allow saving flash movies directly to YouTube. Worry not people, just wait a wee bit more and you can happily upload all your favorite flash videos and flash movies to YouTube.

400 Preset Effects
It couldn’t get bigger than this and its just a reminder of why Toufee 2.0 is complex, sophisticated but yet simple (getting work done with Toufee 2.0 is a breeze thanks to the new UI). With Toufee 2.0, you can never run short of effects for your flash movies. By the way, these are no ordinary effects and we’ve made sure that each of the 400 new preset effects is distinct from one another

Well, the fun is not over yet, there is plenty more to write and I will keep posting new updates on the latest free flash movie maker. Keeping watching this space for cool updates on Toufee 2.0!