Best way to animate...?

Ok, I've known for a long time that Photoshop came with Adobe Image Ready, but I'd never used it until just today. It was slow going for a few minutes, but within about an hour, I had it down pretty well, and I just kept getting better as time went along. I'm not particularly fmiliar with many other animation progs, including Fireworks, and Flash, but how different are they than image ready?

Image Ready, given the way in which it emulaes photoshop, is relatively easy to use and learn for one already adept at photoshop. My only qualm with it thus far is that there's some kind of live image updating function that mirrors the Image Ready image, with the original in photoshop. This causes significant lag on my machine, despite the fact that I have 1 gig of ram. Also, the file sizes are pretty massive, especially if I intend to do any web animation with it.

Does anyone have any pointers as far as 'optimization' or cutting down on file size, or can anyone tell me about some other file formats besides gifs that would let me be able to put a larger animation on a site?

Im more interested in the core animation concepts behind Image Ready, and I'm more interested in making short animations for uses other than flashy buttons on websites. Does anyone have any pointers on any of that, in terms of which rograms may be better suited to those types of applications?

Seriously, no takers?

GIFs should only be used for very small images and short animations. If you have to, cut up your image and only make small parts of it animated. When put all together in one big image it can still look animated, you just aren't animating the parts you don't need to.

There should also be a bunch of compression options in IR, like only saving pixels that have changed, which cuts down a lot on the file size.

I always used Ulead GIF Animator when I made animated GIFs...

If you are looking for more quality, larger images, and more interactivity, then you'll have to go with Flash or possibly Shockwave, though a whole lot more people have Flash installed than Shockwave. And there is about your only options. GIF is the only animated bitmap filetype.