Skip button always helps. And if you put a script to track that particular button clicks, you will see how frequent people click on that.

THat's the problem with flash, it breaks the 'back' and 'refresh' buttons of the browser. A great website will make people keep coming back for more. And people doesnt like to rewatch all your flash geng-ness, objects flying up and down and the 10-seconds preloader everytime they come back.

And people always seem to forget(or dont know how to) to include alternate content in case users have different version or no flash player at all. Accessibility is not disability, its to make sure equal exposure to the mass.

I have to give great credit to Macromedia though, the latest flash editor and player has new rendering machine and supports accessiblity and usability much much more than their previous version. Content are now search engine friendly if you know how to do it and the swf. compression are, if i am not mistaken, 1200% more than the previous version - thus greatly increase accessibility to dial up users and alike.

Oh and IMHO, its totally inaccurate to say that generally web designers prefer flash. I know a lot who dont. Flash is at best, when used subtly.

But then, i might have not been on the same side on flash design compare to css and xhtml design, i am totally full of excitement about flash side scripting. People think of flash as something cool and animated, but behind that flash is very powerful to provide the same kind of backend support and interaction that AJAX and SOAP provide. Trust me, the latest version (rendering and actionscript 3.0) is so powerful, you will see a lot of flash web application pooping out very soon.

Even i use Goowy(http://webserver001.goowy.com/) extensively everyday to manage my task.

Nope. It will only work from the newest editor. I doubt it will have any significant effect if you are just into the design part, but since the AS is now strong typing (instead of loose typing), it greatly reduce the code overhead, but it also means u need to get your syntax right.

But there're already number of ways to reduce current fla fiel, namely compress your images, delete uneccesary objects from library and use math to do some animation instead of the default animation features.

"better medium to present........"

how so?

Macromedia always make sure early adopters get the reward to push through their product. But i handsomely do so this time(by recreating all my swf file in the new flash and optimize the AS). There's no problem with 'many local company' still not using it yet. Ever since flash 7 player, Macromedia has included an automatic function that will prompt you to update your player once it is outdated. The latest player is 8.5 i believe and yeah, u need latest player to play newly created movie with the enw flash editor.

so i dont see any reason why it cant be widely adopted now.