If you’re interested in wringing the most out of Lightroom’s Flash-based Web galleries, check out the Bluefire Blog. It’s written and maintained by the guys at Bluefire, the Web developers Adobe hired to build the galleries. They get down to the nuts and bolts of how the galleries work, revealing hidden settings and more. Note that you can find the open-source gallery code on opensource.adobe.com.
Flash galleries are a big interest of mine, and I hope to have some more good news to share on this front soon. Stay tuned. [Related: Flash gallery hook-up for Photoshop.]
Disappointingly I feel saddened by Adobe’s decision to discontinue the development of Freehand MX. Personally and professionally, I’ve alway viewed Freehand as a much better illustration package over Adobe Illustrator simply because, Freehand is truly an illustrators dream tool. The fact that I can design with virtually no dialog boxes displaying frequent errors (for manual path operations) in addition to the super well designed low level vector manipulation algorithms, Freehand still leaves Illustrator behind. Despite cool Adobe Illustrator algorithms for transforming and experimenting with nice vector results, for pure illustrations requiring only blend, gradients with point and line manipulations, Freehand still shines Illustrator.
My suggestion to Adobe would be would be to implement more designer friendly low level vector operation algorithms from Freehand (or course with better updated code) into Illustrator.
I personally and professionally will continue to use Freehand as my main drawing program and import into Adobe Illustrator if I need to use the cool Illustrator functions such 3D effects, filters…etc).