Make Presentations, Flyers, Web Animations, and More, for Free (Thanks, Adobe)

Need to whip up a quick animated presentation for your Web site? How about a flyer, gift certificate, or PowerPoint-like slide show? Ordinarily, you'd need several different programs to do each of those things well, and in some cases -- like the animations -- a fair bit of expertise to boot. Now, thanks to Adobe, you can conjure up any of those (and more) with a free Web-based tool. And it's simple enough to use that you can skip the technical certificate in Flash design.

Project Rome is Adobe's free animation and presentation tool. It is available online or as a downloadable desktop app via Adobe Air. There are dozens of templates to get you started, and the simple, paint program-like interface lets you paint, draw, add text, video, music, and Creative Common imagery without too much effort. The program connects you to Google Maps so you can insert interactive maps in to your projects. And there's a connection to YouTube, to insert video as well.

Basic animations are simple to add -- you can make individual elements in your project spin, move, and change size, for example -- and you can save your project as images, Web pages (with embedded Flash), and PDFs. Want to learn more about this impressive tool? Check out the video.