Is This The Catalyst You Have Been Waiting For?

Remember Flash Catalyst? To refresh, Catalyst is a design tool that helps you create application interfaces and interactive content without coding.

Now, I don’t mean to be an evangelist about it but I have some more news about Catalyst, more like a screencast actually. InsideRIA.com has published a screencast using the demo of Catalyst they received at MAX 2008. I am a bit skeptical about the software but it does seem to perform the job it’s intended for rather well {read as: we’ll soon be seeing more 14 year olds on freelance job postings}.

Here’s the screencast:

You can download the source files via the blog posting. Doubt it would do you much good unless you have the demo copy of Catalyst.

I find the timeline and extra steps needed to change button states a bit too clunky. The interface seems rather boring as well. What do you think about it?


8

Comments

Hyder

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  • Reaper-Media says:
    March 10, 2009 at 11:04 am

    hmm… i’ll stick to actionscript :P

  • MBMedia says:
    March 10, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    So can we make pre-built components for this program so that even more 14 year olds can make websites… $$$?

  • george says:
    March 10, 2009 at 4:58 pm

    “I find the timeline and extra steps needed to change button states a bit too clunky”

    That’s because this demo is producing an app that is clearly below the complexity level that catalyst was designed for.

    Ryan Stewart’s screencast is a lot better because he uses it for a more complex app.
    http://www.digitalbackcountry.com/flashcatalyst/tutorial01/screencast/index.html

  • Albert says:
    March 10, 2009 at 11:13 pm

    This program reminds me of an expired program called “IMAGE READY” bad and was quite complicated to use.
    Sorry Adobe but very BAD.

  • MSFX says:
    March 11, 2009 at 8:40 am

    Agree with MBM.

    Also the equivalent coding will be so inefficient, similiar to creating a template in Dreamweaver, file size will be 4x larger than whats needed…

  • george says:
    March 12, 2009 at 8:00 pm

    @MSFX

    The code looks pretty clean in Ryan Stewarts example (he shows the MXML output).

    The thing I like about this is that it’s state based. For most of us time based animations (and daisy chaining them) are something we have to work around rather than with when developing state based projects like web apps or sites.

  • Nitras says:
    April 10, 2009 at 8:08 am

    i second most emotions here, but still i can’t wait to get my hands dirty on this.

  • Robert Reynolds says:
    July 8, 2009 at 10:14 pm

    Although the application being designed in this screencast is a bit elementary, the potential of Flash Catalyst along with the upcoming release of Flash Builder 4 should make for some exciting web apps. I have created an entire interactive web app with Flash Catalyst and exported it into Flash Builder 4 Beta, and the code is fairly clean. (should see minor improvements in commercial release) I say great job Adobe on this latest addition to the Flash platform.