Flash Catalyst: A Mythical Beast With the Brains of Flex, Body of Flash, Beauty of a CS4 App

Nearly 1.5 years ago, the Adobe community was treated to a demo of Codename Thermo at Adobe Max in Chicago. Thermo is a next generation tool for designing and developing RIAs. It’s come a long way since then, renamed Flash Catalyst and had a significant refining of its purpose in many many presentations by Adobe personnel, evangelists and community members. The title of this post, making reference to the mythical beasts of lore like the Griffin (Gryphon), is an allusion to the fact the Flash Catalyst is no small bit of work. It draws from the complete Adobe software catalog for various pieces of it’s makeup. It’s got a little of Adobe’s complete DNA strain sprinkled throughout it. Built on Eclipse (like Flash Builder), complete with drawing tools (like AI/PS/FW), possessing some timeline functionality (AE/FL), allowing for interactivity and design time data (FL/DW), Flash Catalyst is one tool from many many sources. Can something so varied in heritage and huge in scope deliver? Well, the community at large is just starting to determine that.

The Flash Catalyst beta (FC) has been in the hands of the general public for a week or so. I’ve been playing with it, too. No question about it, it’s a cool tool. The potential to create fully custom skinned MXML based apps leveraging the Flex framework by designers is very near a “holy grail” of XD judging by the level of interest around this application. So, what’s on everyone’s minds now that it’s more than a MAX demo or screencast?

First off, the toolkit… It’s a little feature incomplete to be used for production work right now, since it’s missing a large number of absolutely necessary components for proper RIA design and development. I’m sure they have planned to dramatically increase that number of of available components, but I’ve started a list for that in the user forums, here, to serve as a community point for discussing this topic. It can’t be easy thinking through the nearly limitless permutations of Advanced Datagrids, Item Renderers and ways that components can be combined and then providing a bridge between design tools, so it’s no surprise that some of those pieces are still absent from FC. The Flex framework is mature and robust, and providing Spark components (the new Flex 4 SDK components) for the entire suite is a big big undertaking. This is largely an effort of dumping tons of resources towards finishing this, so I’m confident this will be taken care of prior to sale.

Secondly, the use cases… There are a number of users/community members out there still a bit confused about how and when FC would fit into their workflow. Most have to do with questions about integration with various Adobe apps, but some deal with roundtrip issues and integration with Flash Builder. An interesting post on that can be found here. I don’t think Adobe can possibly make everyone happy here. There are simply too many masters to serve.

Thirdly, the app has some pretty big stability issues and install problems for a good chunk of users. I’m not going to link to each one here, but a quick scan of the topics in the user forum shows a full third of the posts are about basic app launching issues and very basic feature issues. Now, of course, these issues will be fixed prior to release, but it does go to show just how very far they have to go to get app performance up to par for a retail release. I wouldn’t expect a Flash Catalyst release party at MAX… as awesome as that would be. There is so much un-Eclipsing this Eclipse build, so much Adobe-ying to do. I’m sure they want this app to feel like a CS family memeber, and it’s close, but there is a ways to go (just export the project and read “Invoking Flex” as the progress bar advances, examine the Edit menu using Eclipse icons, note the missing preference panel, play around with the code view a little) before it’s an Adobe app.

So, enough complaining, what are some of the real bright spots in this tool so far?

• Illustrator and FC go together like peanut butter and jelly. I’ve imported a dozen or so AI files into FC and had only minor aesthetic issues with any of them. This bodes well for my RIA mockup tool of choice and FC working well with each other.
• The tool is a fantastic wireframer! I use Omnigraffle pretty much exclusively for this now, so it may be tough to usurp this for me, but if FC continues to add widgets and an extensibility layer to allow new components to be added to the basic library, I can see big big things for this. One of my biggest problems with doing wireframes revolves around it essentially creating a dead document. There is not really a tool out there that allows you to take a wireframe and use it as a part of your final deliverable. Flash Catalyst looks to proivde a way out of this.
• It really does work as advertised. You can indeed wire up a CS4 created mockup to XML schema in minutes. Not kidding here.Very nice!

So, to recap… Not complaining about the tool at all. In fact, the contrary. FC is a brave new world in RIA design. There are so many unknown tricks and suprises in this mythical software beast, though, it’s difficult to see how to get to a downloadable purchase from where we are today. The product is sure to elate many, and possilby disappoint just as many as well, at least in this 1.0 release. I’ve got high high hopes. Maybe that is part of the problem.

How about you, are you enjoying the Flash Catalyst beta? Is it what you expected? Where do you this fitting in your workflow? What part of this Gryphon are you most interested in?

More

When I was in college I had stumbled across a short film on the web that just left me in awe. The film was called More and it really served to shape my feelings of what great animation could be.

I was thrilled to find that Dan Trachtenberg and someone over at slashfilm feels the same way I do about this wonderful film.

links for 2009-06-12

• FreelanceSwitch Hourly Rate Calculator
  A pretty darn thorough calculator to help you determine how much you need to charge per hour as a freelancer.
  (tags: freelance rates tools career)

Spring is over. Had a blast!

The annual Spring <br /> conference was held this past week in Athens, Ohio at Ohio University. A number of very talented professionals gathered to talk shop with the attendees. Ben Pritchard, Kevin Hoyt, Greg Rewis, Stephanie Sullivan were among the cadre. All in all the conference went smoothly, even with the unfortunate absence of Eric Meyer. Eric was able to Skype in his presentation, so it wasn’t a total loss for attendees.

I presented two topics. One on Designer/Developer collaboration, the other a case study on a site we had just recently finished. The comments I go on the talks were all in all positive and I got a lot of great questions. Here is the link to the Developers are from Mars slides and here are the slides for the Case Study presentation.

I really thought that mix of designers and developers for the conference was cool and certainly out of the ordinary. It’s not often you get something so heterogeneous at an event, so to talk to a truly mixed crowd was tons of fun!

Many thanks to the conference organizers for putting together a great day.

Spring <br /> is over. Had a blast!

The annual Spring <br /> conference was held this past week in Athens, Ohio at Ohio University. A number of very talented professionals gathered to talk shop with the attendees. Ben Pritchard, Kevin Hoyt, Greg Rewis, Stephanie Sullivan were among the cadre. All in all the conference went smoothly, even with the unfortunate absence of Eric Meyer. Eric was able to Skype in his presentation, so it wasn’t a total loss for attendees.

I presented two topics. One on Designer/Developer collaboration, the other a case study on a site we had just recently finished. The comments I go on the talks were all in all positive and I got a lot of great questions. Here is the link to the Developers are from Mars slides and here are the slides for the Case Study presentation.

I really thought that mix of designers and developers for the conference was cool and certainly out of the ordinary. It’s not often you get something so heterogeneous at an event, so to talk to a truly mixed crowd was tons of fun!

Many thanks to the conference organizers for putting together a great day.

links for 2009-06-16

• 40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns
  A thick stack of UI design resources for budding interaction and XD designers. A virtual bible of design patterns.
  (tags: UI xd webdesign)

links for 2009-06-17

• 10 Awesome Free Photoshop Brushes | Abduzeedo | Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorials
  I have linked to any PSD brushes for a while… so, here you go. Some high quality ones right here.
  (tags: photoshop brushes free download)

links for 2009-06-24

• SEOmoz | SEO Best Practices: SEOmoz's New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data
  Quite possibly the authorative source on SEO best practices. This is one read you can't afford to miss.
  (tags: seo bestpractices seomoz searchengine)

This weekend the company that I work for, The Iona Group, had a picnic to celebrate their past 25 years of exceptional creativity in business. The entire company put forth a great effort in preparing for the picnic. It is very exciting and memorable for a company to be recognized for their many, many years of service. It is the years of hard work and wonderful employees that helped make it possible. Overall, it is a great accomplishment for a company to be successful for so many years and many more to come. Congratulations to Iona!

Two Years In, How Much Do I Miss Not Having Flash On My iPhone?

As most of you who visit here know, I love Flash. Pretty much always have (Flash 3 baby! I ditched Director as quickly as I could.). Sure, we’ve had our differences on and off again over the years, but overall, I continue to be a strong advocates for the technology and love to use it whenever I can on projects for myself and clients. Many of you are probably also are aware that I am also an Apple geek. I have owned over a half dozen Macs myself, and used them long before I was able to get my parents to finally pick one up for me at the end of high school.

Usually, this works out well together. Adobe/Macromedia software pretty much always runs on Apple hardware, with only a few exceptions. A big one happened a couple of years ago with the advent of the iPhone. Here I was, lusting over the phone, but a little heartbroken that the “real internet” as they put it in the first ads for the phone would be missing a key component, Flash. I bought the phone, and yes, at first, I did miss not having Flash on the mobile Safari browser packaged with the phone. More than a little.

Tease after tease, rumor after rumor, here we are, two years later, two major hardware and software revisions later, and still no Flash on the iPhone. The desire to actually have the plugin on the phone, though, at least for me has greatly waned. I’ve simply moved on. It’s not that I wouldn’t welcome it, but with YouTube encoding the videos in H.264 and a lot of other sites out there doing the same, it’s less important to me. Furthermore, many sites have mobile optimized versions of the site available for iPhone users, so browsing the “real internet” isn’t really relevant as an argument anymore. When you add the app store and all the specialized apps for viewing box scores, Twitter, Facebook and the rest, I actually find myself opening Safari less and less with each passing month as an iPhone user.

Beyond the adaptations that content producers have gone through to make their experiences better on the iPhone, there are just as many things that haven’t been “optimized” for the iPhone actually makes the experience even better. In two years surfing using mobile safari, I have yet to be harassed by an annoying Flash banner ad or crazy iframe popover atrocity. That’s nice, if you ask me!

Now, on the flipside, I as a content producer would love to be able to bring some of my creations to the best small screen platform out there, the iPod Touch/iPhone combo. Of course challenges like multitouch, and lack of a hover state for UI feedback among others would need to be worked out. Who wouldn’t love to hack together some sort of GeoLocational Augmented Reality Papervision freak out awesomeness? With the addition or accelorometers, compass, live Google maps and so many other nice things that phone has to offer, building Flash on the phone would be a ton of fun…

But then again, we’d get so many ad banners. I don’t know about you, but when you sometimes have little control over your mobile bandwidth (eg. dropping to Edge, getting fewer bars than 3, etc), I’m not too keen on giving up those precious bits to some video banner being crammed down my narrow little pipe.

The sheer amount of fun stuff built in Flash would add a ton of great content to the phone, from casual games, to chat apps or even Acrobat Connect. It’s very likely that the App store is the reason that we don’t have Flash, think about how many {content}.99 apps would be obsoleted the instant that Flash hit the phone. That is a lot of income that Apple would lose. This is all but obvious, and widely discussed amongst the Apple and Adobe faithful alike.

What are your thoughts? Miss Flash? Not so much? Why is it on virtually every other major mobile platform, but not iPhone? What would you build in Flash for the iPhone that would be a perfect blend of the hardware’s capabilities and the software’s strengths?