I get links out to great flash movies all the time—from my colleagues here at work and friend’s—heck, I even find them on my own sometimes. I love a great flash movie and some of them are absolutely hilarious. One thing I don’t like about them is making bookmarks to one or digging through my browser cache and deciphering through the .swf files looking for that cool Elmer Fudd movie I saw yesterday.
What would be nice is a program that would make saving flash movies simple, a program I could access though my browser or desktop. A program that would allow me to save movies I tell it to, but also include a viewer that would allow me to view and save right out of my browser cache. Flash Saver will do this for you no matter what browser you’re using.
Flash Saver really is a cool program. Once installed you will notice a quick launch button in the toolbar, of your Internet Explorer. The program also adds an entry to your context menu (right-click menu) With both or either of these active you will see that this small unobtrusive program has a great range of useful options:
For those who happen to use browsers other than IE you’re out of luck with the integrated toolbar button, you don’t get the context menu either. While these are nice options they are not necessary, especially with the SWF viewer that is included and installed with the Flash Saver program. You can use the SWF Cache viewer to view all the Flash files in your browser cache, which is a holding area for all the Flash files your browser has been exposed to. The Flash files are held here in a cryptic form and with out some sort of outside file manager can seem cryptic and way too much work to continuously perform for flash movie retrieval. From within the Flash Opener you can quickly preview and manage all the files in your Flash cache
SWF Flash Viewer:
The player has options to save as, file path, and the file name option—you know the usual fellas from the neighborhood—but also the option to clean your Flash cache, which you will not believe how cluttered it gets so filled with junk Flash ads.
If this is something you might like then you could build up a nice Flash media library that can be viewed without having to be online. You can archive the movies to disk, burn a compilation along with a copy of flash Opener (which is a free stand-alone SWT file viewer), and give it to others.
With the complete set of walk-though instructions out at browsertools.net’s site to help you it will be no time before you got the hang of it. Browsertools.net also has a support via email if you like the idea but can’t seem to get it running; I don’t think that will be an issue however because the program is easy as pie to use.
Download Flash Saver here:
http://www.browsertools.net/Flash-Saving-Plugin/
Download the SWF Opener here:
http://www.browsertools.net/SWF-Opener/
~ Chad
P.S. Just to get you started I’ve included a link out to a site that I enjoy, and is filled with Flash Files. http://www.flowgo.com/
Chad Stelnicki