Since FlexBuilder 3 was released last week, I decided to hunt around for the 'free to academics' offer and see if it applies to FlexBuilder 3. Here's where it lives now:

http://www.flexregistration.com/

Interesting things to note:

1. It apparently does apply to staff too (woo!)
2. You can request more than one license if you're using it for a class or a lab. That will be a real time-saver.
3. You have to scan your ID and submit it with the form. Uhh... scan? paper? I don't have a scanner hooked up anywhere, so I took a photo of my ID with the iSight on MacBook Pro and tried that, thumb included free of charge.

The action page tells you to allow a few weeks for processing the request, but mine was approved the next day.... that's service!

So we got our media for Adobe Creative Suite 3 last week, and I've been fighting with the installs on various systems for the last few days. Some notes from the battlefield:

That popping sound you heard was sudden obsolescence

Adobe Premiere Pro and Soundbooth are only supported on multicore Intel Macs. So much for our "multimedia lab" of 2GHz Dual G5 PowerMacs.

You want how much RAM and disk space?

Be prepared to clean up your hard disks, especially on notebooks -- CS3 Master want's almost 20GB of disk space to install. Web Premium for Windows also complained on our XP systems, which have only 512MB of RAM. I can't really fault them for that, though... XP alone takes that much RAM to function. ;)

Blank Popup Window on Mac Pro Install

I fought with installing Master Collection on my Mac Pro for a few days. The install would get to the end of disc 1 and pop up a blank alert box, mutely asking me to put in the second disc. There were no buttons to click on, and nothing I did could get the install to continue. I had to force-quite the Setup app and clean up my system.

I was eventually able to complete the install by copying the contents of all four discs to a single "payload" folder on my hard disk and running the install from there, as described here.

Turns out the culprit may have been the Safari 3 beta.