Users of other timeline based animation applications will find it easy to grasp Flash. In addition to frame by frame animation, Flash offers Tween animation. Simply place an element in the scene, jump to another key-frame further down the timeline while moving the image to a new position, and Flash will provide the animation for you. This can speed the production of the animation process. Combined with the built in support for layers, this can allow for powerful and complex animations.
Flash comes with some basic drawing tools for design purposes.
Some of the tools allowed for some very interesting results, but we found them to be unlike other drawing programs and somewhat cumbersome. We did like the fact that all elements were anti-aliased after being placed in a scene. Make no mistake about it, Flash is not pretending to be a drawing program. It allows the importation of several different image and sound formats. Graphical text is another matter.