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Comment by hiphopyo | Hacker News Reader

I think it's important to make the distinction between the Shockwave Flash format and Adobe Flash the design tool.

Adobe Flash the design tool is by far the simplest and most intuitive tool out there for designing web graphics, be it in vectors or pixel-perfect raster graphics. Not to mention its combination of layers and timelines which allows you to do a lot more in less time. The whole animations / ActionScript thing is just an added bonus if you're feeling frisky.

Most people use Photoshop for web graphics but that's wrong -- Photoshop was meant for photos. Others use Illustrator but it is way overkill unless you're doing fine arts or complex illustrations.

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Adobe/Macromedia Fireworks? AFAIK Fireworks is the web graphics tool, so you should compare Photoshop and Illustrator to Fireworks not to Flash.

Fireworks is more a collection of stock graphics and widgets geared towards people who want to make quick mockups and such. As a design tool it doesn't even come close to Flash.

No. Fireworks was a hybrid vector/bitmap editor specifically designed for web design. Flash is a vector based animation suite that originally included a javascript-based scripting language call actionscript.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

You're right about Fireworks. Some people do like to use the Flash authoring environment for general web graphic work, even though that's not its primary intent. A friend of mine still uses it for all of his web tutorials and book diagrams. (Flash has tools for exporting single frames in a variety of image/vector formats.)

That's where Fireworks ended up. But it started off as a graphics editor for Flash.

Adobe Edge Animate a new tool similar to Adobe Flash (the design tool). Instead of swf one can create CSS3 and JS based animation. The tool is partly open source (afaik, at least the first version was) and is coded in HTML5/JS itself and runs in a Chromium/webkit application.

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