The Flash compression tool Optimaze! has been released by Ideaworks3D via Electric Rain in the US. The tool can now be bought at the Electric Rain website for US $129.
The price might seem steep, but concidering the kind of work you would have to put in to even get close to its compression of the SWF files, the program easily pays for itself in reduced headackes and time spent doing manual optimization.
What Optimaze! does is to simplify and compress the vector graphics in the SWF files. And it does a good job. Usualy the file size of the SWFs end up being reduced 30-40% compared to the original. They claim to have seen compressions of up to 70% in certain tests and with no singnificant losses in animation quality.
Optimaze! has a Flash MX user interface, optimizes SWFs from Flash 3,4,5 and MX. In fact, it will optimize any SWF files from any SWF-exporting applications, such as Swift 3D. And it imports the SWFs directly so you don’t need the FLA to do the optimization.
Its important to understand that Optimaze! is a vector compression tool, it will not compress/optimize your SWFs if your only content is JPEGs, it does not do any bitmap compression, and it will not compress the sound either.
(I posted another story about Optimaze! the 4th of July)