Flash Camp – whats new in Flash and Flex
Flash Camp is a free event put on by Adobe at various locations. I had the pleasure of attending at the San Francisco headquarters to see whats new with Flash, and where things are headed.
Well one of the biggest pieces of news that came up was the name change of Flex Builder to Flash Builder. The name change leaves me with mixed feelings. On one hand its way more descriptive of what this tool actually does, on the other hand this is an easy way to confuse the vast number of people who dont’ deal with this tool directly. However I welcome the name change and look forward to using the new tools Flash Builder and its companion Flash Calalyst.
Flash Builder has a good deal of improvements, however the biggest improvement is the comanion tool Flash Catalyst which makes the foundation of the trasnition between a design comp from Illustrator or Photoshop to a Flash Builder (Flex) projecet.
Flash Catalyst makes the connection and transition between Designers (and their Design Comps) and Developers (making functional prototypes) easy to manage. Instead of exporting peices of a comp as a bunch of seperate graphics which get implemented with some code, you can import an Illustrator or Photoshop document into Catalyst and apply functionality to it. Imaging taking a scroll bar comp, selecting all of the scroll bar elements, and through a dropdown applying scroll bar functionality to it, then identifying the individual assets (i.e. the scroll track, the thumb, scroll arrows, etc…). Thats all you have to do to have not only a functional scroll bar, but one also completly styled by the designer withough having to create some kind of contrived skin, or the developer poorly recreating the elements as vectors so they are easier to deal with.
The other huge benifit to Flash Catalyst is that early in the design process you can quicly create a mockup that has basic functionality which helps in so many ways. It’s so easy for a designer to throw together a mockup or comp that looks nice but has fundamental interactive issues, or a bad user experience. A designer can easilly apply functionality to most any part of a comp and test it out, the client could even play with it to reduce misunderstandings that offen occur when looking at static images of a proposed project.
So Flash Catalyst has me really excited, and it creates many if not all of the basic elements you need for your Flash Builder (Flex) project so all that should be left is to apply logic and data. The integration between Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst I would expect to literally save days of development time in my future, and also output a nicer user experience as well.
I’m currently working with the trial versions of Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst and I’m really pleased. Thanks Adobe!