Sometimes when large companies buy cool smaller products, it is not a great thing for the future of the product.

Not so for Macromedia Flash.

Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, the first version of Flash released under the Adobe name, is a huge step up from the former Macromedia product, which is used to build dynamic, interactive content for Web pages, mobile devices and online games.

Adobe has made a number of improvements in its flagship products like Photoshop and Illustrator, and this one now joins the fold as a requirement for medium to advanced Web developers. In Flash CS3, Adobe unveils a newly revamped interface, with very cool features like object alignment and scaling, which are accessed using panels much like those in Photoshop. The Flash Tools panel shares icons and shortcuts with the other CS3 products. Other improvements include the ability to use the mouse scroll wheel to scan through layers in the timeline.

The best part of the product is a very impressive (at last!) integration with Adobe Illustrator. Importing from Illustrator now preserves an impressive amount of attributes. The integration with Photoshop also is admirable.

I am far from skilled with Flash in its current version, but I picked up the basics in an hour or two of fiddling based on previous incarnations. If you have had no experience with the product, you would be well-served by investing in a class or a well-written tome to guide you. However, even with no experience with Flash (and at least some programming knowledge), you'll be on your way to basic projects in a few hours. If you have two monitors, using this product rocks as you can open panels on the second monitor.

That said, it is clear that Flash is a constant on Web sites today and becoming more common in other mediums as well.

This version's gains make it a great upgrade at $199 from previous versions. New installs cost $699, though there also are some cheaper academic versions for students and teachers as well.

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Versions are available for Windows or Apple (I prefer the Apple version) with 1 GB of RAM or more for decent performance. It is best to have significant hard disk space, especially if you are going to maintain or edit significant graphics files. The program itself only takes 2.5 gigs of hard disk space after install (about 12 gigs free for the installation itself). Adobe offers a free 30-day trial version of Flash if you just want to download it and poke around. That is a good offer because it will give you a good idea if you have the chops to pull off the full program prior to the full purchase.

Details on the product and the download are available at www.adobe.com.

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James Derk is owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and tech columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com.

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