What Is Adobe Flash CS3 Professional?
Flash has been the industry leader for creating interactive animation and content for several years due to its powerful animation and scripting capabilities. Adobe Flash CS3 Professional is the first version of Flash that held the Adobe name. Designed for professional web designers and developers, Flash CS3 contains many upgrade features that will help someone who is already working in one of Adobe's other creative suite programs.
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Macromedia to Adobe
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Macromedia originally owned Flash 8.0, the precursor to Adobe Flash CS3. In 2005, Adobe purchased Macromedia acquiring the rights to programs such as Flash and Dreamweaver. When Adobe purchased these programs, it included them in a variety of the creative suite packages and renamed the versions to correlate with the current creative suite; therefore, Flash CS3 is an upgrade from Macromedia Flash 8.0.
Cross-Platform
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Although several programs exist that enable users to create animation for the web, Flash is well-known for its cross-platform ability. By downloading the free Flash Player plug-in, you can view a Flash video on practically any operating system with practically any web browser. This removes the strain on the web designer who must ensure that the web page will work the same way on multiple browsers. The designer can view it in the current browser and know that the user will see the same video correctly.
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Vector-based
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Adobe Flash contains the ability to draw illustrations using vector-based graphics. Vector drawing is a way to preserve the quality of an image and the size of the file regardless of the image size. It uses mathematical equations that draw connecting lines between various points in the drawing. When you increase an image, the points get farther apart, but the image appears the same. Alternatively, pixel-based drawing fills a certain number of pixels on the screen. As the image gets larger, more pixels are used and the image becomes blurry.
Actionscript
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The real power behind Flash is its animation and scripting capabilities. Actionscript is a language created by Macromedia to enable interactive web design. This feature has become most popular among developers using Flash. Using Actionscript, a developer can enable interactivity within a movie or a website. For example, users can click on a button and a short animation will play prior to starting the action of the button. The possibilities for interactive animation are only limited by the developer's knowledge of the language.
Improved Workflow
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Adobe's most significant improvement to Adobe Flash CS3 Professional is an improved work flow and integration with the other creative suite programs. Because this program is developed specifically for web design professionals, it is important for the program layout be similar to create a quicker work flow. Adobe, therefore, repositioned the location of the toolbars so that they appear similar to programs like Photoshop and Illustrator.
New Features
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In addition to integrating a new interface, Adobe added and improved some of the features in Adobe Flash CS3 Professional. For example, the copy and paste motion and filters feature saves time by eliminating tedious steps to repeat the same motion. The new ability to import Photoshop and Illustrator files allows you to keep layers and other data types from those files. The drawing tools have also been enhanced to function more like Adobe Illustrator.
Current Version
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Unfortunately, it is difficult to find a place to buy Adobe Flash CS3 Professional because this version is outdated. A few websites do offer old version, but Adobe upgrade Adobe Flash CS3 to Adobe Flash CS4 when it upgraded its creative suites to CS4 in 2008. Adobe is currently planning on upgrading Flash again with its next release of creative suite to CS5 in April of 2010.
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References
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