I'm re-designing my studio home page, originally using Flash 8 for mascot/decoration, I know there's a new version(9 or CS3) of Flash, so I go to Adobe....
Regardless the price, the trial version is around 500MB??
How did they bloat Flash to that install size?
The vesrion 8 installer is about 100MB with docs.
The what's new in flash 9 doc isn't descriptive, either, did anyone use Flash 9 before and know if it's any better?
We updated to Flash 9, but decided not to use it because it would have been too huge a task to update our Flash 8 project to Flash 9 (tens of thousands of lines of code). Apparently Flash 9 is a lot better than Flash 8. Up to 10 times faster code, better debugger, ActionScript 3.0 and so on. Adobe's DevCenter (or whatever it is called) has some articles on what has changed in Flash 9.
-AF
It is not the Flash 9 Development Environment that makes the code 10x faster, it is the (free) Flash 9 Player. That means even when you keep on using Flash 8 for development, you can benefit from the increased performance when the .swf file is run on a Flash 9 Player.
What's really new in Flash 9 is ActionScript 3, which now is a 100% Ecmascript compatible and very sophisticated language and more mature and feature-rich than ActionScript 2. However, I think that this is more important for Adobe Flex 2 developers than for Flashers.
ActionScript 3 also comes with a more advanced framework. For example, it now also supports binary sockets and not only XML sockets.
Another advantage for Inel Mac-users is that the environment is now a Universal Binary. Windows-users won't feel that difference. ;-)