The Flash authoring tool is lousy. It's just a decrepit hunk of deformed aluminum. And I say this as an Actionscript programmer of several years now. Flex, on

The Flash authoring tool is lousy. It's just a decrepit hunk of deformed aluminum. And I say this as an Actionscript programmer of several years now. Flex, on the other hand, is really damned nice, and the Eclipse-based Flex Builder is not terrible. Good debugger. Using jEdit for coding, Flex Builder for compiling and debugging, and Flash only for the bare minimum of FLA editing, you can have a very decent life.