Flash CS3 Professional
Review by Gabe Marihugh (www.creativelevity.com)

I have been a professional user of Flash now for about 7 years. In that time Flash has gone in a few different directions as its capabilities were pushed and developed by the needs of the Flash community of users. Having been using Flash for this long my main interest (other than sparkly new features) is how well a new version of Flash will work for maintaining my older sites, without having to upgrade them to the latest and greatest.

Overall Flash CS3 handles my old sites pretty well. One aspect though of Flash 8 that did not come along with the new version is the Flash Remoting set up. Granted the new AS3 replacement for Flash Remoting is much cleaner and easier to understand, without the integrated support for AS2 Flash Remoting built in I have had to continue to develop some sites in Flash 8. Fortunately I found other Flash users out there with the same issue and that lead me to a tutorial on how to copy over the necessary files to use the AS2 Flash Remoting tools in CS3. Kind of a pain to do, but once done it has been much nicer to be able to not have to keep an old version of the program handy.

Making the change from AS2 to AS3 has been pretty slow. It has nothing to do with the language itself. AS3 is smarter and quicker to implement in all ways (except for buttons which need a bit more code than before, but not bad). I took AS3 for a test run by converting line by line a scrolling platform game I had made a while back is AS2. In the end the game ran better than before and with less code (partly due to AS3 efficiency and partly due to my education since making the original game!).

But on a professional side I have not been able to make the switch over to AS3 sites yet, even for new clients. A month ago I ran into a site project who’s viewers were going to be almost entirely on computers viewing the Internet through Hospital intranets. On these intranets I found I could only really count on them having Flash 7, and that they would have no privileges to upgrade their player. That was an extreme case of course, but I have found time and again that sending out a drafted site to a client in AS3 that they have had to upgrade to see it, which always turns them off. So for now I have been sticking with AS2. Flash CS3 has full support for AS2 of course so it has been very nice to be able to utilize the new and improved interface of the CS3 series while still being able to develop in an AS2 environment.

In the end it is a great upgrade. The interface alone is worth the ease is has brought to my work flow (now if Dreamweaver would just follow suit…what happened there?!?).