Adobe Bridges Designer-Developer Gap with Flash Catalyst

fact sheet

Vendor: Adobe Systems Incorporated (www.adobe.com/)

Vendor's Information:
About Adobe Flash Catalyst
About Adobe

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) require a level of collaboration between designers and developers that doesn't exist in most organizations, especially if they're just getting started with RIAs. With enterprise applications moving toward the Web, rich media, and graphical user interfaces, a new breed of designers, called interaction designers, is now emerging.

Interaction designers want to take ownership of the user-interaction experience, said Doug Winnie, Principal Product Manager at Adobe. But interaction design requires that designers know more about coding, and many designers are struggling with the transition. There's a lack of easy-to-use tools that help designers create interactive interfaces without getting too involved in coding. Adobe Flash® Professional, for example, requires at least some knowledge of ActionScript®.

Adobe Flash Catalyst, a new professional interaction design tool, is designed to bridge the gap between design and development. Flash Catalyst allows designers to create designs using the Adobe Creative Suite tools that many designers are already using, such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Adobe® Illustrator® and Adobe® Fireworks®, bring those designs into Flash Catalyst, and transform them into interactive components without writing code. Flash Catalyst creates the code in the background that will make the design interactive. The designer can then save the file and pass it on to a developer who adds the logic and backend data sources.

Winnie knows firsthand that Flash Catalyst is a product that fills a need for both designers and developers. Three years ago, he was an Adobe customer who just finished an automotive Web site project he described as a "painful experience." At the same time, Adobe announced its project code-named Thermo, which later became Flash Catalyst. It was, Winnie said, exactly what he needed for his automotive Web site project.

Since that time, Flash Catalyst evolved as a solution to help both designers and developers. Designers can use Flash Catalyst to create RIA interfaces without knowing code. Developers can work on data sources and logic without being tied down by design work. Each side can concentrate on what it does best.

Winnie said Flash Catalyst also helps designers and developers collaborate because it presents an upfront contract on how they will work collaboratively.

"In this case the workflow itself is based on the collaboration between the designer and developer," he said.

Flash Catalyst is built specifically around the open source Flex framework. The code it generates when designers build an interface is MXML mapped to known and existing elements in the Flex framework. Flash Catalyst takes advantage of the new .fxg file format, a new XML format to represent graphics for Adobe® Flash® Player. This format is supported with a number of Creative Suite design and development tools and eases the handoff from design to development. In addition, the project format for Flash Catalyst is the same as Flash Builder. Once developers have the Flash Catalyst project they can use the server technology of their choice, such as Java, ColdFusion or PHP, and use the Flex Framework to create the view of their application.

Helping Designers Move to Interactivity
Adobe hopes that Flash Catalyst will make interactive design more approachable. The Flash Catalyst user interface easily directs users through stages of adding interactivity to design elements. It easily round trips edits, meaning designers can quickly go back and forth between Flash Catalyst and a design tool like Illustrator, for example.

These features will be especially important to designers who resisted moving toward interactive design or older designers who didn't make the leap to interactive. Winnie teaches an ActionScript class where many of his students are established designers being asked to do more by employers moving to interactivity. Flash Catalyst will ease the transition.

"Interaction design is fast and iterative," said Terry Hemphill, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe and a veteran of the Adobe Illustrator team. "An application is a concept you want to get out of your head and into reality as fast as possible; having to go into ActionScript makes that difficult."

When creating Flash Catalyst, Adobe specifically and intentionally didn't re-create the tools in its design applications like Illustrator or Photoshop because designers already know those tools and are comfortable working in them. One of the goals of Flash Catalyst is to get traditional designers to design for interactive using the applications they already know.

Flash Catalyst CS5 is available as a standalone product, and it's also available in Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Master Collection, Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Design Premium, Adobe® Creative Suite® 5Web Premium, and Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Production Premium (where it will help designers create portfolio sites that contain video, for example).

Winnie said Adobe is committed to the Flash Catalyst product and that it will continue to evolve in future versions.

"We're actively thinking about the next version and how we can better integrate the experience for designers and developers," he said.

Adobe Bridges Designer-Developer Gap with Flash Catalyst

Adobe® Flash® Catalyst™, a new professional interaction design tool, is designed to bridge the gap between design and development by helping designers create interactive designs using the Adobe® Creative Suite® tools they already know.