There's a commonly used statistic that nine out of ten Flash designers use Photoshop, and three out of four use Illustrator. It's no surprise, therefore, that following Adobe's acquisition of Flash from Macromedia, top of every multimedia developer's wishlist is better integration with the company's existing products.

The most obvious signs of Flash's Adobe-isation are the Adobe palettes, such as Layers, Align, Swatches and Library, that Adobe has given to the majority of CS3 programs, and the CS3 interface, which lets you collapse palettes down to small square icons. There are also some Adobe-style tools in the Flash toolkit: cursors, shortcuts and modifier keys are the same as those you'd see and use in Photoshop for adding, deleting and converting anchor points.

Going primitive

Slightly less obviously, there are some new 'primitive' tools, which let you create easily re-configurable rectangles and ovals, although you'll need to play with them for a while to find a use for them.

Adobe has also ripped out Flash's old drawing engine and replaced it with Illustrator's to ensure artwork remains the same as you move it between the two programs.

CS3's new interface enhancements are to be welcomed, even by old Flash hands used to the Macromedia way, because they are both time and space savers. Adobe hasn't got rid of any of Flash's trademarks, such as its timelines or stage, and being able to use those Illustrator and Photoshop tools in Flash is a huge bonus; Flash was never as good for creating artwork as animating it.

Which takes us nicely to the next bit of integration: importing files. Bringing Illustrator and Photoshop files into Flash documents has become a lot more reliable. Using the Import function now brings up a dialog box that specifies in almost mind-numbing detail the layers in the file you've selected. You can then choose which layers to import; whether to import them as Flash layers or not; the size to import them at; whether to import text as editable, bitmap or vector outlines; and placement.