2Simple 2Animate review

Verdict:

Review Date: 19 Oct 2004

Price when reviewed: inc VAT single-user licence; £199 ex VAT site licence

Reviewed By: Sue Gee

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

This program gives primary-school children the opportunity to create animations, while also developing their computer skills.

It has a simple interface and provides easy-to-use tools including thick and thin pens, fill, spray, shapes and stamps. Children can draw a sequence of frames, aided by drag-and-drop copy and paste methods, and then play the resulting animation.

2Animate can be used at three levels and if you are surprised by the lack of functionality it's because it starts in Basic mode. You have to use the introductory video and manual - there is no onscreen help - to access the teacher's Options and change it.

In the Basic mode you are limited to drawing with coloured pens and playing an animation. The Intermediate level allows you to save and open files, add and remove frames and to copy and paste between them. In Advanced, you can publish to the internet and use 2Capture, a utility that supports a digital camera or webcam. 2Capture can resize and rotate a captured image and apply special effects, such as blur. The program has built-in support for scanners and lets you copy images from the internet.

Although its simplicity is attravailable, 2Animate would be much more powerful with the addition of some vector graphics tools for moving and resizing drawn objects. It would then be easy, for example, to show a character waving or a heart beating. These facilities would turn a good classroom tool into an excellent one.

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