Review: Chameleon Flash Pro Edition

Price: $99.95 (single license)
Authors: Chameleon Flash
Score: 8/10

Overview: Chameleon Flash excels as a tool to use with your swf application for standalone projects.

PROS:

• Very easy to use interface.
• Can do the most commonly requested features for projector swfs.
• Adds licensing and trial periods to swf.
• Real transparency for swf
• Ability to create a chromeless application and remove the standard context menu

CONS:

• When using the transparency feature with a chromeless application, it introduces unexpected behavior into the application. It’s certainly a bug.
• The “Draggable window” option disables drag events for objects in the swf
• Other buggy behavior in the application.

About Chameleon Flash:

Chameleon Flash shines as a tool to use along with your swfs to be projector files. It has several great features which are extremely easy to use and offer superb benefits. My favorite is the option to give your swf files a trial period based upon days or number of times the application has been ran. In addition, you can create licensing and registration for the files as well! It’s a great feature and if this was the only thing Chameleon Flash offered, it would be worth every penny.

Another great feature is the ability to strip away the chrome from the swf application. While this is an awesome feature, be careful when using it as it could add unexpected behaviors to the swf. While testing a Flash 9 application, when this featured was enabled my video player timer wouldn’t update as I scrubbed the video. However, once I turned off the feature everything worked as expected. Another bug with Chameleon Flash is in the GUI. Checking and unchecking the “Draggable window” option will not give you the option to apply the change. You must change something else before the Draggable window option will register. It’s a small bug, but can be confusing if unrealized it is there.

 Some of the other options I really like are:

• the ability to completely remove the standard content menu and add your own custom menu extremely easy;
• auto launch an URL or file when the application closes;
• and the ability to bind a custom icon to your application.

But besides those, there are many more. You can check out their website for a complete listing: http://www.chameleonflash.com/

Chameleon Flash is a really great tool. Its best feature is certainly the trial and licensing. I would, however, be a little cautious when using it for other things. Within three minutes of installing the application, I found two bugs which leads me to believe there may be more.