Adobe Flash Catalyst

Peter Worlock talks to Adobe’s Andrew Shorten about Catalyst and how it fits into the Flash Platform.

HardCopy Issue: 43 | Found In: Design & Media | Published: 01/02/2009 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010

At its recent MAX developer conference, Adobe announced a raft of new developments around Flash, Flex and the supporting technologies, including a brand new product called Flash Catalyst. Peter Worlock met Adobe Platform Evangelist Andrew Shorten to learn more about the future of Flash. Can we begin with the bigger picture, in other words what Adobe is now calling the Flash Platform? We’ve seen how Flash is evolving over time from people creating interactive content and animations to micro-sites. In the last few years it’s exploded to encompass a whole range of technologies and tools, and bringing together people who are using Flash in different ways. At the core of the Flash Platform we have the Flash Player, which is the browser runtime; and AIR, which is our desktop runtime. Increasingly we’re seeing runtimes across different platforms – the Web, the desktop, mobiles and devices - all of which can display Flash content and run Flash-based applications. So we’re looking at how we provide tools and frameworks, and then servers and services, to help people build and deploy these applications. For designers we have Flash Professional which enables them to create interactive content and experiences, using the Flash authoring tool. More recently we’ve been developing Flex which is a framework to allow applications developers build and deploy applications that run in Flash. A big focus of ours today is bringing those two things together, helping designers and developers work collaboratively on projects to create applications that have expressive and engaging user interfaces.

Adobe Platform Evangelist Andrew Shorten.

So how does the new product Flash Catalyst fit into that picture? The current workflow for a Flex developer is that they really own the project. With Creative Suite, designers have been able to have input into the project by creating visual components inside of Flash Professional, or by creating skins and graphics that they can then bring into the Flex project using other Creative Suite tools such as Illustrator, Fireworks and Photoshop. What Catalyst does is to change that workflow by enabling greater collaboration on a Flex project. From the outset, designers creating the visual interface for an application can take their design from Photoshop or Illustrator or Flash and bring it into Flash Catalyst to begin creating an interactive and rich user interface. Catalyst allows them to take various pieces of the UI and convert them into components in the Flex framework. They do this visually using Catalyst’s editing tools; but behind the scenes, Catalyst generates all the Flex code that a developer can then bring into Flex Builder to add business logic and connect to data. Presumably that means that future development of Flash, Catalyst and Flex will be done in lockstep? As you add capabilities to one, you add them to the others? Yes! A lot of the groundwork has already been done in the Flex Framework. So we have a new version of Flex Builder in version 4 (previously codenamed ‘Gumbo’) and that has all of the basic work required to support both Flash and Catalyst. So we’re looking at things like adding graphic primitives to MXML in the new FXG [Flash XML Graphics] format for representing graphics, fills and shapes inside of Flex Framework. We’ve also got new features around text components for displaying text in high quality. We’ve done some work around components, separating the user interface from the business logic. All the work in the framework has been done so that we can apply the tooling to enable people to build expressive UIs inside Catalyst and business logic in Flex Builder. But the two tools are very much in synch, so you’ll be able to take a project you create in Flash Catalyst, bring it into Flex Builder using a new file format called FXP [a packaged version of a Flex Builder project], and move back and forth between the design tools and development tools. It makes it much easier for designers and developers to collaborate through the life of a project.

Adobe Catalyst allows designers and developers to import a design from Creative Suite applications and convert elements into active components such as buttons, menus, and scrollbars, and to add interactivity and transitions.

So is Catalyst a design tool, a developer tool or a collaboration tool? All of the above. The key goal of Catalyst is to allow designers to collaborate on Flex projects, but equally it allows designers to create standalone content and applications just using Catalyst. It feels very much like a Creative Suite tool, even though it’s based on Eclipse just like Flex Builder. When you bring a Photoshop document into Catalyst you’ll see all of the layers and folders you created in Photoshop appear inside Catalyst. The way we’ve worked with drawing tools and the artboard, where the UI is rendered, is very similar across the CS products. It’s very much designed for the designer, allowing them to take static artwork and create a rich, engaging user interface. You work by selecting pieces of the UI, converting them into components, adding animations and transitions, and doing all of it visually on a timeline.

But Catalyst is no substitute for Illustrator or Photoshop – you can’t do pure interface design in Catalyst? Well, a good use case for Catalyst would be for prototyping. There are drawing tools in Catalyst, such as rectangles, ellipses and lines, and text, which could be used for prototyping. Developers can create a wireframe of the interface they want to build while the designer is working on the visual look and feel inside Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash or Photoshop. Also those tools could be used once you’ve brought content in from Creative Suite to add additional drawing to the document. But we certainly expect that the design side of the UI would be done using the familiar Creative Suite tools.

Behind the scenes, Catalyst automatically generates the necessary code. Roundtrip editing between Creative Suite apps, Catalyst and Flex Builder is a key feature, and Flex Builder supports version control and merging.

Can you talk a little about Flash and AIR? Does a developer have to make a decision about which platform they target? Flash content runs in the browser and there are constraints around what you can do in the browser, even though Flash is very expressive. There are some things like connecting to files on the desktop and being able to work offline that you can’t do very easily inside of a browser. So AIR should be considered a superset of the features in the Flash Player. Everything you can do in Flash you can do in AIR, but you widen the sandbox which means you can access the file system, you can link to a local database, you can have your custom UI running outside of the browser. So when someone is building a UI in Catalyst and/or a project in Flex they can actually be building both a Flash-based application and an application for AIR at the same time, and then choose to expose different features and functionality based on whether you’re running in the browser or the desktop. If you create AIR applications the users have to download and install the application before they can use it. We’ve made that process really easy, but it’s still something that the user has to do. By contrast, Flash content in the browser is an ‘instant-on’ experience. I’d recommend that people consider the use case for the application: who’s going to use it, and does it need the features of AIR. You also recently announced something called OpenScreen. What is that? We’ve worked very hard to ensure that Flash Player is as widely distributed as possible. With the most recent release of Flash Player 9, we saw that nearly 90 per cent of people had that version within nine months of release. We launched Flash Player 10 in September 2008 which added support for 3D effects, filters and blends, rich text control and higher performance using graphics card support. Flash Player has also been announced for 64-bit Linux. The next step is to think about extending the reach of Flash content beyond the PC. We’re working with other industry partners on the OpenScreen project to enable us to deliver Flash and AIR on other devices. The goal is to allow Flash content to run on a mobile or a device or a set-top box. Current partners include all of the leading mobile phone manufacturers, network providers including Cisco, Qualcomm, and VerizonWireless, and hardware leaders such as Intel, Arm and Toshiba. What is the timeline for Catalyst? We want to get feedback from people early in the lifecycle of the product, and we also have a lot of parts working together here in Flash Catalyst, Flex Builder 4 and the Flex framework, all of which are building on features in Flash Player 10. At our MAX conference in December we gave attendees a preview release of Catalyst and Flex Builder Gumbo so we can get that feedback. We’re looking to have beta versions available at Adobe Labs soon, and we expect first releases of Flex 4 and Flash Catalyst in the first half of 2009. By the time that Catalyst and Flex 4 are available as production applications Flash Player 10 will be distributed far and wide and should be at the 90 per cent mark of previous releases.