Flash Catcher Review
It’s nice, but far from perfect...
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You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Nicely integrates with Internet Explorer, clean & easy-to-use interface
Only works with Internet Explorer (no Firefox support), no management of downloaded flash files, integration could have been better
Flash Catcher enables you to save your favourite flash files to your local hard drive, for your viewing pleasure. Trough this program seems to advertise itself as something for the beginning internet user, it does require some more advanced input.
Right after installation, it offers me to read a help file. Not that it’s bad, but you would like to be welcomed by something more user-friendly, like a webpage opening in your standard browser.
After finding out that Flash Catcher would have integrated itself in my Internet Explorer, which sounded like a nice start, I opened up Microsoft’s well known browser and came to the horrific sight of a big flashy button being placed next to my address bar. At first I thought another spy-ware would have infested my computer, but alas. A nicer approach would have been an option when I right clicked a flash animation I would like to save.
Alright, so I clicked that ‘huge’ button and got a overview of all the flash animations on my homepage, quite nice. Next I looked into the options window, and I was surprised to see my the root of my hard drive (C:\) as being set to the default location.
So I selected the first flash animation in the dialog and pressed the ‘Save’-button which allowed me to save the swf file right to the place I liked. Trough this seems handy, there’s no after-download-support for flash files, my computer doesn’t associate swf files with any browser, and therefore it probably won’t on computers of beginning internet users who would be stuck after this step. A nice ‘My Flash Files’-folder in My Documents or ‘Flash Archives’-window in the application itself would truly help a lot.
It’s a good attempt for something that is surely needed on the web, but it just doesn’t float my boat. It has a good but too-obvious integration with Internet Explorer, and that’s it. No welcome screen, no collection of downloaded flash files, nor other browser support. Understandable for the intermediate computer user, who know their way with flash files; but absolutely not for the beginning user where for I feel this program was intended for.