Developing in Flash was something that has been bound to hit me for a few years now and I have avoided it and ignored it for a long time now. The main reason's being that I have never been able to get my head round animation and the use of a timeline and Flash, to me, is another proprietry plugin for your web browser that we could probably all do without the hassle of having to install.

But I am not developing Flash apps for the web so it is ok.

Adobe's new CS3 and CS4 packages comes a big price tag and a 30-day trial is just not long enough for me to learn everything I need to learn and do everything I need to do. Investment in the latest version of the Adobe's authoring suite was always going to be out of the question as I never plan to adopt Flash as my choice for web development. So I started considering other options aside from piracy.

Eventually after reading much, I understood that Actionscript 3, the language behind Flash movies and FLA and SWF files can be compiled into SWF applications ready for release using Adobe's free, open source Flex SDK.

So with that in my hands I started to 'Google' terms like 'Actionscript 3 source editor' and came upon a real gem.

FlashDevelop is a free, open source editor for Actionscript 3 amongst many other possibilities including a new language called haXe.

I found FlashDevelop really easy to set up and use, it's auto-completion is BRILLIANT and indispensable for an Actionscript 3 beginner, helping me get through these beginning stages of Flash development with great ease.

All you need to get started is the Flex SDK, a stand alone Flash Player Debugger and FlashDevelop.

Unlike the Adobe's Flash authoring suite you write everything in Actionscript 3, no interaction from and the mouse and no timeline. I am sure this free, open source method of development has it's draw backs, the timeline and physical WYSIWYG stage are there for a reason, but for the purpose of creating simple Actionscript 3 applications quickly and on a low budget, FlashDevelop is brilliant.