Pros & Cons
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- Excellent integration with Photoshop and Illustrator; revamped Pen tool; ActionScript 3; enhanced Flash Video Encoder and skinning.
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- Minor interface difficulties; inadequate two-monitor support; hand-drawn animation support not improved.
Adobe Flash CS3 Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Mac OS |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Type: | Business |
| Type: | Personal |
| Type: | Professional |
As evidence of Flash's importance to Adobe, the program is featured in all but one version of the
The reservations I expressed in my reviews of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign about opening multiple minimized palettes and about two-monitor support apply here as well. Luckily, Flash also shares in the interface overhaul that permeates most of the Creative Suite. According to Adobe's statistics, 70 percent of Flash users also use Illustrator and 94 percent use Photoshop, and those users' top two requests were to improve the importation of Photoshop and Illustrator files into Flash. Fortunately, Adobe really nailed this. You get basically the same import window whether dealing with Photoshop or Illustrator files, letting you go through the file layer by layer dealing with issues such as live text and image compression. When the art is imported onto the Flash stage, all layers and hierarchies are preserved. And the path fidelity when moving vector art from Illustrator to Flash has been much improved as well.—
Pen and Brush
That last point (pun intended) leads us to the serious retooling that Flash's bezier Pen tool has received. Its behavior is now virtually identical to Illustrator's superior Pen, in terms of overall behavior and modifier keys. This is good, but my chief complaint about Flash CS3 is typified by the lack of attention to the Brush tool, Flash's best freehand drawing tool.
Adobe seems almost unaware that Flash is a hugely important tool in the creation of broadcast animation. The reviewer's guide mentions that Flash is depended on for "creating interactive Web sites, rich media advertisements, instructional media, engaging presentations, online games, or content for mobile devices," but there's not a word about the many animated television shows created in Flash. Let's be honest: Drawing in Flash isn't a very positive experience. Why are the brush sizes so limited? Why doesn't the brush make the same-size stroke regardless of your zoom level? Programs such as Toon Boom Studio provide a much more flexible and friendly environment for creating noninteractive cartoons, and Adobe really needs to work on this area in CS4.
If creating hand-drawn animation in Flash CS3 makes me rant, there's much to rave about in terms of programming. ActionScript 3 makes its Flash debut, and Flash makes good use of it. One excellent feature lets you convert tweened timeline animation into ActionScript to be repurposed at will. This helps designers and developers—or the right- and left-hand sides of your brain—get along. When looking at code in the Actions window, you can collapse lines with total freedom, making it easier to focus on the task at hand. And the new debugger is much more powerful at helping you massage the kinks out of your ActionScript code.
Of course, Web sites such as YouTube have made Flash Video hugely popular, and Flash CS3 comes with the same Flash Video Encoder companion application bundled in the previous version. There are a few nice additions such as deinterlacing support, but the most improvement has gone into skinning the video player, with many presets and customizable components you can tweak at will.
Adobe Flash CS3 Professional is an amazing program with wide-ranging capabilities, and for CS3 Adobe's priorities were appropriately focused on teaching the program to get along with Photoshop and Illustrator. There's plenty left to do to improve Flash for CS4, but the better integration alone provides enough reason for most users to upgrade.
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