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While I also disagree with the previous comment somewhat, "No need to buy Adobe tools or hunt the .fla" is not an advantage of any other development platform; t

While I also disagree with the previous comment somewhat, "No need to buy Adobe tools or hunt the .fla" is not an advantage of any other development platform; that's because the real tools used for Flash development (Flex SDK, the compiler, and asdocs/etc) are free. Indeed, the IDE is seldom used nowadays by many shops; it's not that there are "alternatives", but that there are better ways: I know I've been doing Flash for 10 years and my IDE of choice now is none other than Eclipse. For all it's worth, you can create full Flash content with notepad, the official command-line compiler, and if you want graphics, some SVG editor or GIMP or whatever.

mgcross 17y ago
I can't imagine being able to complete an animated banner ad implemented in HTML5/JS (or Flex for that matter) in anywhere close to the time it would take within the Flash IDE. Using the Flash IDE, I can also apply JPEG compression to 24-bit PNGs (with alpha channels). I really wish there was a similar alternative for HTML. And as poor/buggy as the font support is in Flash, it's still far better than using a flattened image. The timeline, filter effects and third party tweening solutions also bring a lot to the table.