Dreamweaver CS3 isn't the only former Macromedia product that has made the jump to Adobe?s Creative Suite 3 design and publishing toolset. The other app to make the cut: Flash CS3 Professional, the vector-graphics program that has become the de facto standard for Web animation, navigation, and other interface elements ($699 as a stand-alone app; $199 upgrade).
I took Flash CS3 for a spin, and learned a lot from my hands-on experience. Just as you now benefit from being able to move images between Dreamweaver and Photoshop, you can now copy and paste Photoshop .psd and Illustrator .ai files into Flash projects. When you import a .psd or .ai file, a dialog box appears for choosing the layers to import and selecting other settings.
The one drawback of the transition to CS3 is that the Flash interface has undergone yet another change to take on the Adobe look and feel. The interface changes appeared minor to me (the Properties panel and timeline are where they?ve always been, for example), but longtime Flash users may need a slight adjustment period.
Being a DW owner since version 2 -- and having bought into the Flash-DW-etc studio suite back a few versions ago -- I've always had a wary relationship with Macromedia , who, like some other publishers who came out of the Macintosh design milieu high-hatted their users and seemed to treat them as docile cash cows.
But when I heard that Adobe was buying Macromedia I was in a black mood for days.