Spent some time playing around with Flash Catalyst, which was released by Adobe as a public Beta yesterday. I downloaded it today and got started on some of the tutorials Adobe labs has put up.
My impressions:
It’s pretty neat stuff. I could see myself prototyping with it, although Keynote and Acrobat are my tools of choice at the moment.
From my limited time working with it, Catalyst’s main function is to make it very easy to take Photoshop or Illustrator compositions and turn them into fully (front end) functional interfaces, complete with animations, transitions, fades, buttons states etc. One of the tutorials had me import artwork of a scrollbar, in 4 layers. Creating an actual scrollbar and hooking it up to a canvas was as easy as selecting the individual layers and telling catalyst which part of the scroll bar it was (up button, down button, track and thumb). It;s also super easy to connect user actions to specific screens (or states, as Catalyst calls them).
Although I’m not a Flex developer, It looks like it also works seamlessly with Flash builder (Formerly Flex builder). The workflow that Adobe is promoting is clearly Create designs in Photoshop or Illustrator, wire the interactions in Catalyst, then hand the file over to developers using Flash Builder to connect front and back end into a fully functional application.
I’m skeptical that the tools assume a rigid and defined workflow between design and development, which would make them useless for building applications in an agile iterative manner. Perhaps the format necessitated it, but each of the online tutorials I went through assumed that the front end interface would be completely finished graphically before any coding started. This is just not the case in any projects I have worked on. In reality, design iterates along with development. It evolves as new requirements are uncovered. Catalyst does maintain a dynamic link to its source PSD or IA files, and therefore conceivably designers could iterate on those files as developers are working on application logic. But I get the sense that Catalyst wasn’t created with that workflow in mind, and using it for iterative design/development would lead to major inefficiencies.
I hope to use it more as I have time, and hopefully get it involved soon as a prototyping tool on an upcoming project. Then I’ll learn some more about its strengths and weaknesses. I’ve only spent about an hour total on it as of this writing, so I’m not expert, but these were just my first impressions. Feel free to let me know what you think.
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dude thanks for your review,
i have downloaded beta version and downloaded tutorial.
tutorial was based on MAC and i have WIN.
now i found a lot of options missing in my version of Flash Catalyst.
Why is that so as I’ve downloaded it directly from adobe website.
can u suggest me (windows) flash catalyst tutorials.