Flash Catalyst: say goodbye to Flex client developers

Adobe Flash Catalyst has been announced at the MAX Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago.  The  Adobe design product is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding.
The concept behind Flash Catalyst is to give to designers the ability to fully develop the user experience of a Flex and AIR applications rather than being limited by  graphic tools such as Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator. Today changing the look and feel of a Flex application is not a very linear process and designers are frustrated by the limitation they have to face with. While developers are forced to spend some of their time in the designing process of a RIA applications: creating effects, states, animations. transitions, applying CSS, symbols and so on.

I'm pretty sure that Flash Catalyst would represent the killer applications in the field of RIA (Flex and Flash) and desktop applications (using AIR) designing under the Flash Platform. I'm very excited to see the final release.

There are some great tutorials on Adobe Flash Catalyst on the official Catalyst Team's blog:

• Getting Started - Understanding the Flash Catalyst User Interface
• Creating Other Gumbonents with Thermo
• Getting Started: Building a simple image portfolio
• Exploration: Interaction Design for a button
• Exploration: Building a Standalone “Geocache Finder” Widget: Part 1

I want to investigate and learn more about Flash Catalyst these days during the MAX Milan.

Comments

[Ivo]

Looking at the Catalyst output reminds me of Dreamweaver or FrontPage HTML. It looks good but its fat very verbose code. I think client developers are safe, Catalyst will get the look &feel but the performance and component creation will be handled by devs.

[cisnky]

Flex client developers are going nowhere. Microsoft Expression said something similar and my experience has not been the greatest. Yes the tool will save us developers from having to take a psd or illustrator file and cut it up into the relevant graphic objects, but it won't stop us from ripping out the and tidying up code that is outputted during the whole process.

[Rob McKeown]

I don't think the goal of Catalyst is to put client developers out of business. The intent, to me, seems to be to allow for designers to take their vision further, allowing them to communicate to developers what they are actually asking for. Any designer who has handed both static screenshots and a working prototype to a developer will agree that the working prototype adds much more value. Catalyst should make the creation of that prototype something most designers can do.

[jlgaustin]

I work at a company that does enterprise application development and I doubt very seriously that the caliber of components and types of applications we develop that Catalyst will be able to handle. I see this as being a great too for prototyping idea's, trying out effects and transitions quicker. It is being presented as a design tool not a development tool.

[Il Douche]

Are you kidding me? You're experience in developing flex apps must be limited to mxml and zero actionscript or use of frameworks. Or maybe you are developing REALLY simple apps. You should want to investigate and learn more about the things you are trying to blog about.

[Alan Klement]

I've been informed on Thermo/Catalyst for quite some time and unless the Catalyst team adds more features and capabilities, this application will be a great dissapointment to most people. So far, Ivo and jlgaustin are correct - it is severely lacking any 'real' power, and is little more than a 'design view' similar to Dreamweaver.
Great - so this app writes code , that will have to be rewritten anyway by a developer, and it allows a designer to assign skins to components, but they can do that faster and easier already.

What possible need does this fill that there isn't already a successful solution for? Flash animating and designing is already a simplified After Effects and Illustrator, now Catalyst is going to be a simplified Flash IDE.

[Yohan Araújo]

I really don't think that Catalyst will be the killer of RIA applications.The goal of it is accelerate and simplify the development with Flex and Air.What I think that could happen is Flex and Catalyst become one application.

[Maikel Sibbald]

Oh come on, marco.....You want me to look for a job now :P
What about custom components, making use of libraries like away3d
We, flex developers, can still beat this thing!!!

But yeah, it makes the transition between desinger and developers much easier... I love it!

FC 4 ever ;)