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Friday we mentioned reports that Adobe is cooking up a competitor to Macromedia's Flash in the arena of vector animation for the Web (see our story at http://www.maccentral.com/news/9912/31.adobe.shtml). Sources confirm that such a critter is in the works.

The product Adobe has in the works is an update/addendum to Illustrator (perhaps version 9.0, though we're not certain). Supposedly, the company is hoping to develop a "Flash killer" that gives users of Illustrator an easy-to-use and comfortable environment to work plus Flash-like capabilities as well as full XML integration.

Adobe is incorporating the ability to read and write Flash files, meaning that the flash plug-in will play a GroundZero animation (though you may have to have Flash in order to publish the .swf file), according to another report at http://www.w3nation.com/features/news/groundzero.htm.

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