I gave the program a try and during operation, Mamutu (yesterdays offering) found 3 levels of suspicious activity within 5 minutes of use.

Having added some photos I then clicked the settings button to see what options there were and found that the resulting dialogue box was sitting in the middle, right between my dual monitors. When I attempted to drag it to a more favourable position the box greyed out and there was nothing more that I could do to access it or the main program without a forced ending, which of course lost all that I had done to date.

It seemed that you have to add one photo at a time, which could be a drag if you are adding many.

The range of options in the template settings when you go to publish was impressive although there was no button to go back to the original screen. You actually have to close it but this should be more obvious.

You are able to save the Flash template settings for the specific customisation, which is a nice feature.

After I published to an .EXE file and attempted to run it, Norton Sonar immediately flagged it up as a high risk and automatically deleted it.

The time taken to create the .EXE file though was blazingly fast, which could be of use if you do decide to add a large collection of images for publication.

Whether the Mamutu or Norton warnings were false positives, I do not know at this point but I am sufficiently cautious not to use the program any further at this point.

If all is well, security wise with the program then with a few modifications, it could be rather useful.

PhilS  –  13 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+80)

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Why bother with a program like this one and then have several others to do other such kinds of fun.
I use WINDOWS PHOTO STORY 3 to do what this will do and even more such as adding voice and music both as well as creating very nice infor promos and after you make them you can convert them to any format you want with FORMAT FACTORY. These programs are free and always very good. They are updated from time to time to keep you modern.

kEN  –  13 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+31)

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Sorry guys but the finished product (ie the the finished flip book) is just not that good. Page turn animation and overall effect is just not of the same quality of other similar programs out there.

For example "Flipping Book Photo Album Builder" price at the same $99 but is a much more polished product.

Perhaps worth $30 but not more

Chris  –  13 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+28)

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Downloaded, installed and activated fine (XP Pro, SP3).

Slight glitch at the moment is that its 'full-screen' mode is a title-bar's height down from the top of my screen, and hides the bottom of the program's window behind my taskbar. Not too much of a problem, since the only things down there are page numbers and arrows, and there's enough of them showing to work with. Annoying, though.

However, you can manually move and resize the window.

Lee  –  13 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+22)

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We've more recently seen flip book creation apps that were easier to use, but I think today's Photo to FlipBook is a more flexible, closer to biz use alternative. What I think it needs is a way to save project-wide templates, &/or base new pages on the 1st page you created, so you don't have to set up each page from scratch, making it more work to use. OTOH because each page can be different, because each page is handled individually, you have the sort of flexibility you need to create a flip book that looks like you were serious, that makes you look more like a pro & less like someone working out of their bedroom. Something else to like, you can import & use your own [higher quality] artwork for things like page frames. On the downside, like the other GOTD flip book makers we've seen, you're not creating a self-contained Flash file -- images are stored separately, with the Flash file you're given being just a viewer. Photo to FlipBook will however let you create a stand-alone, fully self-contained *.exe file [that Flash viewer bundled with your page images & the stand-alone Flash Player].

TO use Photo to FlipBook you 1st import your images -- you can't select/import a folder, but you can select & import every image in it -- then drag those images from the viewer pane, placing them on the page where you want. If you click an image you'll get a pop-up to set the Scale, Angle, Opacity, & Flip the image -- your images may be cropped to completely fill the frame on the page -- & it would be nice to be able to drag the photos within that frame rather than only having them centered. You can add full page frames, selecting from those included, or browse to another folder -- the "Settings" button lets you set frame width, color, & opacity. Photo to FlipBook does let you add text, with or without one of the 9 included call-outs or frames, but those frames might best be added separately so you can drag the text to place it where you want it inside that frame. Working with, setting up a page, there are two things that I grew to hate -- there's no Undo [so Save-As frequently], & whomever thought it was a good idea to have transparent dialog windows with white text couldn't have been more wrong... it might pay to have a solid color image you can drag onto a page, make any settings, & then put in the image you wanted. Once you get your pages the way you want them, clicking the "Publish" button brings up a new program window that acts like a separate app -- close it to get back to the original window. That publish window is where you control or set a pretty fair number of options, e.g. backgrounds, shadows etc., & output your project as a flipping book.

Installation isn't bad, doesn't include its own version of Flash or anything, giving you the "Photo to FlipBook" program folder, with 340 files, 52 folders, ~13 MB -- under All Users\ Application Data the new "A-PDF" folder holds 2 sub-folders but no files -- & another empty folder, "Flip Image", was added under User\ Local Settings. Installed/registered, Photo to FlipBook adds 2 program keys & 1 uninstall key to the registry. Didn't see anything unusual running today's GOTD with SysInternal's Process Explorer, but the flipbooks you create can take a fair bit of horsepower to display properly -- before handing out your work you might want to test it on hardware that's similar to what you expect will be used... you may wind up needing to reduce size, not use page flip FX etc.

All in all I think Photo to FlipBook is fairly usable, & I could see myself using it regularly but not every day -- making DVDs from recordings & such I'm well enough used to work-arounds, so the more tedious aspects, like setting up each page don't bother me all that much. That said, I wouldn't be willing to put up with the shortcomings on a constant, daily basis, & I'd be looking far & wide at Flash apps before I paid more than $10 -- $30 for Photo to FlipBook... for $100 I expect more than an app that, in a nutshell packages your images with a canned viewer. That isn't a criticism as much as [I hope constructive] suggestion to the devs.

mike  –  13 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+21)

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