It's a very powerful tool. This is the perfect software for me to create my own animations and photo slide shows. I downloaded this of limewire a few days ago. I havent mastered this program yet, but I'll keep reading the online tutorials. If anyone gets this, make sure ya really want to learn this because its kinda complicated.

All I can say is that it is a fun program since it allows you to be so creative. There is a significant learning curve if you are going to use it to its full potential. For a long time I just used it as an introduction to a website. As bandwidth became more common this product has evolved to do much more things than just simple introductions and animations. I have created CDs with this product that were in no way something that would be used on the web. Yeah, that's right... you can use it like a programming language, burn it to CD and have a standalone program without even being on the net. When I finally came to the conclusion that this program is on the professional level is when a textbook author hired me to create a highly interactive interpretation of his printed book. This took a number of months but more importantly this guy was a real micro-manager. He was a control freak. He had very specific thing the way he wanted it to work and very specific ways the information should be presented. All the way down to the kerning of the text in some situation. Actually I'll never work with someone like that again since it was like being 'creatively handcuffed' but I learned the most important things about Flash. It was... that you can do "almost" anything that is asked of you in Flash. Programmers understand that concept. When you have a bad language or one just getting off the ground you find that you "work around" a lot of things to deliver the results. This is called "smoke and mirrors." With Flash, in most cases, you can go directly to the heart of the matter then "expect" it to deliver what you want, and it does. It's a very good program and one of the top accomplishments for Macromedia in my opinion. However, it wouldn't be there unless the plugins were so abundant and easy to install (especially back in the early days). Here too is where Macromedia did their homework. If a person really wanted to they could make an entire website using Flash (and some have). The step into the professional realm is when they went a step further to pass variables and objects. While it isn't necessary to look at it any way but as a tool to make it perform, Macromedia has actually created a language with this product. In fact in the early days even Microsoft saw the handwriting on the wall. The idea was to "make a better IDE for the Flash language." Microsoft started on this path with Liquid Motion. Adobe did this with a few of their products including GoLive (more support). I think by now most are not seeing Macromedia as a threat and they have the better IDE. Above I have given you the "feel" and "analogy" of how it comes to my mind. But I'd be amiss if I didn't give the way Macromedia sees this application: In the real sense of programming or a language, Flash is really just a scripting language (they call it ActionScript). It's not a program, but a "movie." The IDE is actually the "authoring tool" so it can be used with the "Flash Movie Player," a virtual machine. While all of that is impressive from the programming standpoint the graphic side is equally as impressive. With Flash you are talking about graphics as much as your are the behavior of Flash graphics. The most impressive thing about Flash is how they incorporate 'vector' graphics along with bitmap graphics. In the early days all you got was vector graphics from Flash. They later incorporated raster graphics. In fact their "player" rastered the vector graphics. Typically a program that creates the vector image will raster the vector before its final output. They now use a combination of both vector and bitmap. For instance, you can have a bitmap image of a photo along with vectored lines plus the ability to size them with the player. I tend to think that took some trickery, at least to do it as well as they have. Flash is not a lightweight and I am about as impressed with Macromedia ability to create such a thing as I am about Flash's ability to deliver what you created. If all of the above seems like gobbledygook to you, it doesn't matter because it all comes back to my first statement of, "All I can say is that it is a fun program since it allows you to be so creative."

Great for serious creators as well as amateur doodlers.

Rating 4,6 ::great web animation/website producing software. Lots of features for animation.The only gripe is that it can be RAM/CPU cycle hungry. I recommend running win2000/XP (or on linux with most of the vutual machine/win-Lin environments aval.) with more than 128MB RAM/ 750+MHZ PIII/AMD duron/atlon Processor and 16MB Video memory for graphic intensive websites.

awesome - high tech companies use the Flash