Whats the difference?
Whats the difference between the mentally priced Flash CS3 and the student edition you can get for less than £100? even the upgrade is double the student version..

Nothing :D I got the Student CS3 design premium package for around £200, and its exactly the same as the normal version, I just had to send a photocopy of my student card in to register.

Yeah, Adobe is really good about giving student discounts. Of course, a lot of businesses hustle them and use the educational versions even though they're not technically allowed to sell work under the educational license. Thankfully, my company furnishes all my software... However, if I ever do go out on my own, I'll have to give them their money. They've earned it! Adobe has a small enough developer market that they really need to charge exorbitant prices to break even on new R&D.

yeah theyve earned it. I'll admit i always used pirated versions up till a few years ago... how else would i have had access to learning the software properly? But as soon as I started making money from it I gave Adobe their dues... and will continue to. I know people who pretty much owe their entire career/earnings to Adobe's tools, and yet wont fork out for legal versions... I dont see how that could feel right.

Is Adobe as strict with their CS as Macromedia used to be with director and flash? Because if so, it is quite dangerous to post stuff online with illegitimate copies of such.

I think so, although even that was more of a scare tactic than anything. Big Brother of software is watching (or so they want you to think).

Is Adobe as strict with their CS as Macromedia used to be with director and flash? Because if so, it is quite dangerous to post stuff online with illegitimate copies of such. it would be dead easy to go down that route.. but its an app that can connect online like with any Adobe product it scans to see if you need updates etc so i dare say it would be possible to see if the software was legal or not

not that I'm advocating piracy (I honestly have replaced all illegal copies of programs on my computers with free alternatives) but there are plenty of firewall like programs that stop programs from phoning home.

not that I'm advocating piracy (I honestly have replaced all illegal copies of programs on my computers with free alternatives) but there are plenty of firewall like programs that stop programs from phoning home. I kinda promised myself i would be good when i got the new PC at christmas, hence why all my software is well out of date lol any hope of getting CS3 anytime soon has totally gone up the wall now as we had our car stolen earlier today, since been found burnt out :twisted:

and thus is part of the reasoning behind the price of the CS suite. No one has a free version of flash (at least not a good one)

Well, there is an open-source AS2 development framework that has emerged called FAME. It consists of Eclipse, an AS2 language plugin, an open-source Flash compiler, and something else. It doesn't have the timeline WYSIWYG, but it got everything together for heavy AS2 development. Unfortunately, it's been depreciated with the advent of AS3. Just wait, there will be another. Currently Adobe is developing Thermal, which will revolutionize the FLA (and all other propitiatory formats) by making them XML based rather than binary. That means that third parties will have a bit more of a fighting chance at working with the native file formats. Also, Flash player has gone open source, and Adobe is releasing the compilers. They are making huge moves to expand Flash as being an Internet standard platform. I think the Flash and Flex IDE's are becoming less of a product driver than just having a foothold as the emerging web standard.