Flip Boom Classic for Windows

Flip Boom Classic provides all the tools you need to make a very simple animated film. With its basic controls and excellent layout, it's a great program with only one tiny snag.

We found Flip Boom's interface to be a successful design from top to bottom. It maintains the layout of a children's drawing kit, but it offers a sophisticated set of tools for creating animated digital video. Flip Boom also saves animations that can be viewed with an iPod, with Windows Media Player, or online. Its online tutorial offers a step-by-step guide to the process that gave us all the understanding we needed to create a cartoon. The program features a wide array of colors and other options. Especially notable is the ability to create separate "Frames" that you then run together to form a cartoon. Actually drawing the frames is a simple procedure that feels much like using familiar tools like Windows Paint. Unfortunately, Flip Boom only offers one drawing tool, which we feel is a major drawback. We would have liked the option to use many different brushes for variety and to exert more control over the editing process. Regardless, we shuffled around our frames and quickly created a crude cartoon. While we wanted more options, we still loved everything else about this program.

Flip Boom Classic has a seven-day trial period and leaves a watermark on the finished product. While we wish it offered more versatile drawing tools, this program was great fun, and we recommend it.