ActionScript 3 makes its Flash debut, and Flash makes good use of it. If creating hand-drawn animation in Flash CS3 makes me rant, there's much to rave about in terms of programming. 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. Let's be honest: Drawing in Flash isn't a very positive experience. 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. 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.Īdobe seems almost unaware that Flash is a hugely important tool in the creation of broadcast animation. Its behavior is now virtually identical to Illustrator's superior Pen, in terms of overall behavior and modifier keys. That last point (pun intended) leads us to the serious retooling that Flash's bezier Pen tool has received. And the path fidelity when moving vector art from Illustrator to Flash has been much improved as well.- next: Pen and Brush When the art is imported onto the Flash stage, all layers and hierarchies are preserved. 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. 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. Luckily, Flash also shares in the interface overhaul that permeates most of the Creative Suite. 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.