Here’s the tentative agenda and important info. You can register for free at the Flash Camp Boston event site.

How Much: Free and open to the public (Limited space and Registration required)
When: Friday, March 19th, 2010. 5:00 p.m. EST – 10:30 p.m. EST
Where: The Charles Hotel, Harvard Square, 1 Bennett St. Cambridge, MA 02138
Why: Why not?
What to Bring: Yourself and your laptop. We’ll be providing the beer, food, prizes, and access to parts of the engineering team so you can get all of your Flex questions answered.

5:00 – 5:45 p.m. Registration/Food/Drinks/Networking
5:45 – 6:15 p.m. Keynote
6:15 – 6:45 p.m. Overview of Flex 4
6:45 – 7:00 p.m. What’s New in Flash Builder 4
7:00 – 7:20 p.m. Break
7:20 – 7:50 p.m. Animation and Effects in Flex 4
7:50 – 8:05 p.m. Introducing ColdFusion Builder
8:05 – 8:20 p.m. PHP and Flex 4
8:20 – 8:50 p.m. Creating Custom Layouts in Flex 4
8:50 – 9:10 p.m. Break
9:10 – 9:40 p.m. Advanced Skinning in Flex 4
9:40 – 9:55 p.m. SpringSource and Flex 4
9:55 – 10:15 p.m. Flash Builder 4 Secrets
10:15 – 10:30 p.m Flash on Mobile
11:00 p.m. Doors Close

For those of you who can’t make it to Boston we’re also going to be running an event in San Francisco just a bit later with a very similar schedule. So those of you on the West Coast can get some face time with the engineers as well.

The quality of the screencast (and the audio) ended up being bad, so I apologize for that. I’ll be better next time.

What’s New in Flash Catalyst Beta 2 from Ryan Stewart on Vimeo.

Flash Platform Runtimes

We’ve been saying all year that Flash on mobile devices is a push this year and we’ve made a lot of progress. Today at the keynotes we’re going to be showing off Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones. This is the version of the Flash Player that we’ve been working on so hard this year. We’ve been working with some great partners including Nvidia and ARM to optimize the player for those devices and create a quality mobile experience.

Possibly more important is that the number of companies committed to the Open Screen Project continues to grow. Today we announced that RIM is joining the Open Screen Project, which means that Blackberry will be supporting Flash Player 10.1. Google is also on board. We’ll have public versions of Flash Player 10.1 for Palm, and Windows Mobile later this year with Google Android and Symbian following shortly. Developers will have mobile bits in their hands soon.

We also announced AIR 2.0, which is going to give Flash developers a lot more native hooks into the operating system. A lot of the developers I talked to wanted it and so that’s what the team did. Mike Chambers talked about some of these features at Flash on the Beach. Another cool feature of AIR 2.0 is the ability to record from the microphone without going to a server. getMicrophone can now be a reality

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Tools

We also have public betas of both Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst that are available today. I’ve been really impressed with how far Flash Catalyst in particular has come from Beta 1 to Beta 2. It’s a lot more polished, has more functionality (including video) and feels a lot more fun to use. If you checked out Beta 1 and found it lacking, you should check out Beta 2. We’ve also made big progress on Flash Builder and I’ve been a very happy camper using the tool full-time.

Servers

Some very cool stuff is also happening on the server side. We’ve released ColdFusion 9, a spectacular release with some great features including the ability for you to consume ColdFusion as a service from inside of your Flex application without writing ColdFusion code. I’ve also been playing with the LiveCycle Data Services release and its modeler plug-in for Flash Builder. The team has focused on model-driven development making it easy to generate and create a model, and then link that model directly to your Flex application. It helps by generating all of the assemblers and you can directly modify the user interface just by changing the model.

Finally we’ve got some Flash Media Server news. We’re adding support for HTTP streaming, which will include support for content protection. We also have released the Collaboration side of Flash Platform Services and announced pricing so you can jump in and start adding collaboration to your application.

If you guys have any questions (sorry I don’t have more fleshed out info, it’s a lot of news), feel free to drop me an email – ryan@adobe.com and I’ll try and answer what I know.

The issue that comes up most is that not everyone starts that way. In a lot of cases people create a skeleton application first in Flash Builder and then want to apply visual designs later. Themes are one option, and we’ve got a new Theme chooser in Flash Builder to help with that, but one of the great things about Flex 4 is that it’s easy to create very customized, unique skins for components. So without the ability to do round-tripping between Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder in the 1.0 version of Catalyst, what can designers do to iterate on a design alongside a developer? The answer is the Flex Library project.

I realize this is far from an ideal workflow, but I think for Flash Catalyst 1.0 and Flash Builder 4 it works okay and provides a way for teams of designers and developer to iterate together without stepping on each other’s toes.

Core Steps

• Export assets to a Library Project in Flash Catalyst.
• Import that Library Project as a Library Project into Flash Builder
• Link the imported Library Project to your main Flash Builder project.
• Make design changes in Flash Catalyst.
• Re-export the Library Project and import it by overwriting the old Flash Builder Library Project
• Your main Flash Builder project will be updated with the new design.

Detailed Walkthrough

So let’s say a developer has an application that they’ve created with the default components. I’ll start with something really basic:

<s:Button x="19" y="78" label="Button"/>
<s:HSlider x="210" y="31" />
<s:List x="152" y="108">
 
</s:List>
<s:TextInput x="10" y="31"/>
<s:Button x="152" y="77"/>

Clearly a great RIA in the making. But I take a lot of pride in my work and I want to use the power of Flex 4 to create a unique set of skins and components that stand out. In the ideal workflow I would be able to give this to my designer, they would open it in Catalyst, create some great components, and send it back to me. I can’t do that, but I can do some design in Catalyst and then bring in those designs in a special way. First I’ll create some great looking components in Catalyst by starting with a blank project and importing Illustrator/Photoshop assets, and then convert them to components.

After I turn all of my artwork into interactive components I am going to pop over to the library panel and start giving them usable names. By default Catalyst calls the created components “Button1″, “Button2″, “ItemRenderer1″, etc. I give them names that will mean something to the developer and help differentiate components.

Once I do that, all I have to do is export my library file into an FXPL file by right-clicking anywhere in Catalyst’s Library panel. With that done, I have the ability to import that FXPL file as a new Flex Library project in Flash Builder.

That library file contains all of the assets and skinned components I just created. In order to use those, I simply add that project to my main Flex project from the project Properties->Flex Build Path and I can start changing the skinClass attribute for my components to point to those new files.

<s:Button x="19" y="78" label="Button" skinClass="components.BlackPushButton"/>
<s:HSlider x="210" y="31" skinClass="components.MetallicSlider"/>
<s:List x="152" y="108" skinClass="components.GreyDataList">
 
</s:List>
<s:TextInput x="10" y="31" skinClass="components.MetallicTextInput"/>
<s:Button x="152" y="77" label="Button" skinClass="components.GreyButton"/>

But now the client tells us they want that black button to be an interstate sign (who knows). I have that asset in Illustrator so I can open my original Flash Catalyst file that I created the library project in and I have a couple of options. I could create a new button with a unique name or I can change the original button component using the round-tripping between Illustrator. I’ll do the latter.

Once that’s finished toggle back to the Library panel and re-export the assets making sure to overwrite the original file. Then switch back to Flash Builder and go through the import process again. By default, it will try to create a new project and just append “_1″ to the project folder. Make sure you overwrite your project by removing that. You’ll get a warning, but that’s fine.

This is where the magic happens. Without doing anything, you can run your application and you’ll automatically have those new assets. Any event handlers you’ve wired up to the button or any code you’ve created that use that button will remain unchanged; only the button graphics will change. Because the projects are linked, any change we make to our imported assets filter down to our core project.

The designer can use that original Catalyst file and the re-export process to make modifications to any asset we want. They can also create new components from artwork, create custom components, or add image assets and all of those will be available to the developer inside of that main Flex project.

This is all still kind of a work in progress, but I think this will work for some of the design-develop problems people need to solve. While the 1.0 version of Flash Catalyst will have some limitations around the Flash Builder workflow, there are still a lot of basics there that can be built on. If you’ve tried this or have other ideas on how this could work, definitely drop me an email. I’d love to hear feedback.

• lineHeight for Text element was always exported as %, now it’s exported based on a value selected in Fireworks ( % or exact)
• Tab indention was not correct for elements that were exported as bitmaps
• Exporting invisible bitmap elements caused script errors
• Updated Rectangle primitive object to export transformation matrix and roundness value
• Modified / Added Application Private Data for all elements (d:userLabel , d:type, etc.)
• Exporting effects applied on Groups and Symbols

So fear not Fireworks users, Flash Catalyst may not have native file format import for you, but you’ll still be able to use the tool you know and love and bring those designs easily into Flash Catalyst with the “Open from FXG” feature.

For those in the Washington, DC area I’ll also be at CFUnited doing a talk on Flash Catalyst that will cover all of the basics including design-develop workflow. I’ll also be doing a talk on using Flex 4 and ColdFusion 9 as part of coverage on ColdFusion 9 with my Adobe colleagues. At CFUnited you get a double-dose of Catalyst because Dee Sadler will be talking about round tripping and wireframing. It should be fun, so sign up!

The screncast walks you through the basic workflow of taking a Photoshop file, importing it into Catalyst, and turning the artwork into components. Then in Flash Builder we use some of the new design-centric development features to wire up that artwork to an actual data source. All of the data is coming from a ColdFusion server using the new ORM/Hibernate functionality.

Keep in mind that we’re still early for both Catalyst and Builder. We won’t have everything we want in Catalyst 1.0 but this beta represents a HUGE step over what some of you saw at MAX last year so we’re making a lot of progress. It’s snappy, it’s tightly integrated with the CS4 tools, and it opens up a whole world of design centric tooling for the Flex Framework. What makes this all possible are the fundamental changes to the Flex SDK for Flex 4. We’ve completely separated the logic from the look of a component which means designers and developers can collaborate without stepping on each others toe’s. We’ve abstracted the layouts so you can dynamically change the layout of components creating some very cool looking components. We’ve integrated Flash Builder with a lot of your favorite backend technologies so it’s easy to consume and generate services to connect to data.

I’ve created a screencast to help people check out the new features. It goes through the workflow of moving from a PSD to Flash Catalyst and on to Flash Builder when you want to bring in real data.

There are a lot of resources to make sure you get up to speed quickly using the new tools. Here’s a good list:

• Flash Builder developer center
• Flash Catalyst developer center
• Mordy Golding worked with Lynda.com to provide FREE training videos for Catalyst
• The Flash Catalyst Exchange for seeing and downloading projects and samples
• We’ve got a series of eSeminars coming up in the next couple of weeks
• Adobe’s user group tour for Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, and ColdFusion is kicking off this month
• Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst forums for asking questions
• Serge Jespers has a bunch of resources as well.

If you’re having trouble uninstalling the MAX preview and installing the public beta, give these steps a try:

• Uninstall Catalyst
• Download the Mac version of the Repair tool from this page: http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/licensing.html
• Run the Repair tool with the default options.
• After the Repair is complete, re-install Catalyst and enter the SN when prompted by the installer.

I came up as a Flex developer. I’m still a Flex developer. If you’ve ever seen me try and demo Flash CS4 you know how much of a trainwreck I am when I’m outside of my precious eclipse-based IDE. In the early days there was a pretty solid line between people doing Flex and people doing Flash. But as Flex Builder evolved, a lot of people started using it for AS3 only projects. The “traditional Flash developer” would move between Flex Builder and Flash CS4 a bit or had started to use Flex Builder as their primary development environment even if they weren’t using the Flex Framework at all. As the Flash Platform has grown up, the types of people using the tool has increased. And that’s what a good tool should do; it should be basic and powerful enough to meet a variety of needs.

So with the name change, we’re acknowledging that the tools for creating Flash content are independent of frameworks or other parts of the Flash Platform. And I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.

Some of the push-back I’ve seen has been from Flex developers who enjoyed a clean break from the perceived baggage of the Flash brand. For you guys, not much is changing. Knowing the Flex Framework inside and out is still going to be a much-demanded skill. You’ll still be able to call yourself a Flex developer, you can still say you know how to build Flex applications and you can still pitch clients on Flex instead of Flash. No one is going to ask you what tool you’re using. The Flex brand still lives. The bigger concern, and one I think is more valid, is one like Constantiner posted:

Ok. What we have now? We have Flash IDE and Flash Builder IDE (looking forward for questions from customers and colleges about what is difference and why Flash Builder IDE has advanced code editor but can’t compile fla-files and Flash IDE can compile them but useless for serious coding?). And we have Flash Catalyst which can use projects imported from Flash Builder IDE but can’t share the same project and can’t edit fla-files. And have one ugly child aka Flex SDK which is what? How to explain colleges and customers why Flash Builder IDE hasn’t timeline and can’t build flas but can use something which called Flex SDK (why Flex? why Flash?). And in other hand Flex SDK can be used to develop only in Flash Builder IDE and Flash Catalyst but not in Flash IDE. And what about beginners? Why Adobe going to drive them mad?

I can tell you after watching this whole experience that at a big company doing something as simple as a name change takes a LOOOOOONNNG time. Let alone trying to take two mature products like Flex Builder and Flash CS4 and get them to work better together. So Constantin is absolutely right when he says that there are still a lot of things that need to happen. But now that the naming is set we’ll keep working on bringing the tools closer together so that you can interchange between all of them as well as the design tools on the Creative Suite side.

I’m less concerned about people figuring out which tool to use. As I see it, here’s the landscape for Adobe’s Flash Platform tools:

The developers to the platform will use Flash Builder, the designers can use Flash Catalyst, and those of you who are creative developer rockstars will continue to use Flash Professional to create some great content.

Hopefully this clarifies the name change a bit. We’re going to be doing a huge user group tour to talk about Flex 4, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, and ColdFusion 9 in June, so if you want to find out more, check with your local user group. The long and short of the announcement is that all of your tools and technologies are staying the same, we’re just working on making them play better together.