By the way, I was looking for a decent package to do Flash animations and was seriously put off by Adobe/Macromedia's unrealistic price schedules.

It also seems that open source and other free Flash software is not quite ready for prime time. I know, I tried most of them.

But then I stumbled on this thing called 'Firestarter' by a company called CoffeeCup. It isn't free, but it is very reasonably priced and does all the stuff that I wanted to do with flash. Sure, it doesn't have the bloated feature set of Macromedia, but if you just want to do some simple animations, and bring some life to your website, it's all you'll ever need.

They've also got a bunch more stuff - FTP clients and web editors and lots more cool web design software, all reasonably priced. Last I looked you could buy the entire suite for less than any Adobe product (with the exception of acroread, which is still free to get people to buy the Acrobat development package).

Oh yeah, there's a promotion and if I put up this link they're gonna' send me some free software. That's OK, I like their stuff. I would've put in a plug for 'em anyway.