Adobe Flash Professional CS5 is the latest version of the enormously popular web design tool. In its original incarnation, Flash gave web designers an efficient way to send artwork and animation over limitedbandwidth connections. Flash’s claim to fame was its ability to deliver vector images over the web, making download times shorter. Flash’s use of progressive downloading and streaming allowed some elements of a website to display immediately, making sites more responsive.

Today Flash is a robust toolkit for creating anything from simple animations to full-fledged websites and complex web applications. To the simple tools for creating and animating artwork and interface elements and writing the HTML necessary to display all those elements in a web page via a browser, Flash adds a full-fledged objectoriented scripting language, the ability to display video, and ever-more sophisticated text, graphics, and animation tools.

Flash CS5 offers a new tool for working with text—the text-layout framework (TLF)—which gives you access to a wide range of typographic effects and text-layout methods. New deco-tool patterns create repetitive elements, such as flowers, trees, and buildings; there are also animated patterns for flames, smoke, and particle generators. Additions to the properties of IK bones let you simulate physical forces acting on items animated with inverse kinematics. A new Color panel makes it easier to define colors, enhancements to the code editor in the Actions panel make working with ActionScript in the authoring environment easier, and the addition of a Code Snippets panel helps with common scripting tasks.