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Sometimes less is more.
Two Boston-area companies are hoping so, anyway. DK Pictures Inc. and FableVision Inc. are challenging Adobe Systems Inc.’s (Nasdaq: ADBE) Flash Professional, aiming for a segment of the software giant’s market that doesn’t need all the bells and whistles Flash provides.
Waltham-based DK Pictures, launched in 2007, provides its software free over the Internet in an online animation community called DoInk. This year, the company plans to roll out paid premium services like sound, premium artwork and virtual gifts.
Dedham-based FableVision, with offices at the Children’s Museum, has been making educational software since the late 1990s. Last year, the company rolled out Animation-ish, an animation teaching package for children that retails for $60. Animation-ish was built in a partnership with Canadian firm Toon Boom Animation Inc., which makes software used by movie industry animation studios.
Flash Professional, which costs about $700 and runs on a desktop computer, offers more than 100 tools for animators. Most beginners only need to use about five of them, said Gary Goldberger, executive vice president and director of production at FableVision.
Both Animation-ish and DoInk are vector-based animation products designed to provide much of the basic graphics computing involved in animation: letting users create layers of background, set motion paths and automatically calculate elements such as scale, rotation and positioning. But the user interface is far less complicated than what Flash users see.
“People can’t figure (Flash) out,” said DK co-founder and president Karen Miller. “Some of the cartoonists are still doing things by hand because they can’t figure out Flash. We set out to create a really fun, easy Flash-light product.”
Miller founded the company with Dick Fryling, formerly of Tom Snyder Productions Inc., the Boston-area gaming company where FableVision co-founder Peter Reynolds got his start.
DoInk is the second co-venture for Miller and Fryling, who in 1998 co-founded Dome Imaging Systems Inc., a Waltham-based medical imaging company, which sold for $61 million in 2002 to Planar Systems Inc.
Priscilla Alpaugh, a part-time illustrator and muralist in Maynard, began using DoInk last year, when the product was in alpha mode, and has contributed suggestions that have shaped its evolution, the company founders said.
“It’s been kind of a great way to figure out a version of Flash or something similar, and I kind of just play with it because I’ve never done anything animated before,” Alpaugh said.
Alpaugh is in a market segment Adobe should be addressing, said Yun Kim, research analyst at Broadpoint AmTech Inc. But it’s hardly an Achilles’ heel for the software giant, he said.
“I’m kind of surprised that Adobe has failed to address the low-end (animation) market,” he said. “You would think that they would be able to offer a low-end version of the Flash player.”
Reynolds said he and his brother and co-founder, Paul Reynolds, dreamed up Animation-ish after preaching the value of Flash animation in the classroom. Peter got e-mails from teachers who had spent money on the software and couldn’t figure it out, he said.
“My particular passion is trying to get creativity in the classroom — allow teachers to teach more creatively and kids to learn more creatively,” he said.
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