Adobe LiveMotion 1.0 is a flexible tool for creating interactive graphics and animations.

The basic LiveMotion interface consists of toolbox, timeline and compilation windows, but I found the usual set of palettes and swatches tended to get in the way.

LiveMotion has an impressive set of tools. Anyone familiar with the Adobe range of products will feel quite at home with the product and be creating animations without too much fuss

Designers should be able to do all the work in LiveMotion without having to use another application. As LiveMotion supports both the Photoshop and Illustrator formats these files can be opened directly in LiveMotion.

Layered files can be opened as keyframe sequences, composite objects or a series of independent objects. Even after a Photoshop or Illustrator file has been placed in LiveMotion, the same file can still be edited in its native application. Changes are automatically reflected in the LiveMotion composition.

The timeline in LiveMotion is object-based, not layer-based. So, object attributes such as shape, text, scale, position, and so on --- can be animated in a non-destructive manner. These attributes can be edited at any time.

Each object in a document can be animated individually. This is a handy feature if you are creating complex animations. Auto keyframing and auto tweening also help simplify things.

Any combination of creative effects can be saved as a style and applied to other objects. LiveMotion has a full range of colour palette options.Choose Web-safe colours or a colour scheme palette, which will ensure that a colour scheme remains consistent throughout a presentation.

LiveMotion supports all major formats such as WAV, SND, AIFF, AU and more importantly, the ubiquitous MP3, which for some reason would not work on my test PC.

It is a pity there is no standalone player for LiveMotion files, as it would make a handy tool for business presentations.

It is impossible to write about LiveMotion without comparing it to Macromedia's Flash, although they are two very different programs.

I found LiveMotion a lot easier to use for creating animation. It is ideal for animated GIFs and banner ads even though it does not have all the bells and whistles available in Flash.

The manual is thin, but the online documentation adequate probably because there is no complicated scripting language to worry about.

LiveMotion has nothing like Flash's ActionScript but does have a Run JavaScript behaviour. Advanced users who know JavaScript should have no trouble opening the bonnet and getting their hands dirty.

LiveMotion supports all the common Web formats including Flash (SWF), GIF, PNG JPEG, TIFF, EPS, PSD (Photoshop) and AI (Illustrator) files can be imported.

LiveMotion has the ability to export an entire file or just selected objects and generate all the necessary HTML code. The image quality or compression can also be set for individual objects or globally for the entire composition.

LiveMotion files can be exported to SWF (Flash). Adobe had no choice here as the Shockwave format has become something of a web standard.

However as it is not possible to import SWF files. Designers wanting to swap over to Adobe may have second thoughts if they have already invested a lot of time creating Flash files.

Designers put off by the complexity of Flash will find the simplicity of LiveMotion with its intuitive interface appealing. It will be interesting to see what version 2 looks like.

LiveMotion is available for Mac or Windows PCs.