I just got Flash 9, which is currently the penultimate version of Adobe Flash Pro.
Before that, I was using Flash 6, which was released around 2001 - there has been a lot of improvements since that time, as you can imagine.
One of the major new possibilities is the ability to manipulate bitmaps, with both ease and power. I did a first experiment with that, called nameTracer. After your entered your name, leaves will fall to draw it. I hope you'll like it.