By Lee Schlesinger
Network World, 6/29/98

An intranet site doesn't generally require the flash of an Internet page, but you still want one that has a bit of style.

That's the appeal of dynamic site creation tools such as Astound, Inc.'s Dynamite and Microsoft Corp.'s Liquid Motion (acquired from Dimension X). They can help you develop Web pages that have some pizzazz.

We tested Dynamite and found that it lives up to its name with an easy interface that lets you create dynamic content quickly. Our testing revealed Liquid Motion is a typical Microsoft Version 1.0 product - it's on the right track but lacks the features and ease of use of comparable products.

Dynamite and Liquid Motion have many similarities. They let you change the appearance of buttons and other content as a mouse moves over them or as they're clicked, they import graphical and text objects and make them move around, and they publish your finished content to a Web page - Liquid Motion creates Java animations and Dynamite creates pages with JavaScript code. Pages are viewable by Version 3.0 and higher of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator browsers.

Import, sizing and effects

And, while you can import and resize graphics files with both products, Liquid Motion forces you to specify the new size in pixels. Dynamite lets you do that, but you also can change the size by a percentage of the original.

Both programs let you associate sounds with animations, but only Dynamite lets you link in AVI, MPEG and QuickTime video, too. Dynamite also lets you apply a number of Photoshop-like effects to graphics before you place them in animations.

Placing objects means dragging them to a workspace. Dynamite lets you view a 2-D grid for precise positioning and then snap objects to the grid. With Liquid Motion, you can specify absolute pixel positions for objects individually.

Liquid Motion and Dynamite feature timelines that let you easily see when the effects you apply to your animation start and end. And, you can specify multiple or continuous repetitions of a motion.

Once you have graphics on a page, you can define actions to occur when you position the mouse over them or click on them. You can use a number of other triggers, but many of them work only when viewed with Internet Explorer.

Dynamite is easier to use. The interface is a workspace with a toolbar at the top and a palette of special effects tools down the side. To create effects, you drag a tool from the palette onto the workspace. Right-clicking on a object brings up a context menu of all possible properties and actions you can impose on that object.

Dynamite's timeline is in a separate window rather than integrated into the main window like Liquid Motion's. There's a toolbar for setting text formatting and another for adding HTML objects.

Liquid Motion offers a traditional Microsoft interface, with toolbars at the top, an Explorer-like tree in the left pane and a construction workspace. The product lacks a text formatting toolbar; instead, you set font attributes in a separate window when you insert text. And the product doesn't have any HTML editing utilities; Microsoft expects you to use FrontPage for page creation.

Liquid Motion builds animations based on a timeline. You can make animations appear and disappear with a multitude of transition effects. However, it has no facility for previewing animations in multiple browsers. You need to do this manually if you care what your animation will look like to someone using any browser other than the default browser installed on his PC.

The package lets you insert a variety of bundled 2-D and 3-D shapes. You can of course import images, but only in GIF or JPEG format. (Dynamite supports a much wider variety of graphic types.) You can move and rotate shapes in Liquid Motion by grabbing handles at the end of axes drawn through the shapes.

Both products are simple to install. Liquid Motion includes a helpful online tutorial and Astound provides useful tips on its Web site and includes the full manual online.

We found Dynamite gave us all we needed for virtually anything we wanted to display. Liquid Motion shows promise, but it has a bit of growing up to do.