Category Archives: Flash Catalyst

The Flex Builder “Identity Crisis” and the Flash Platform

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Lee Brimelow left a comment over on Keith Peter’s blog about Flex Builder. That spawned a pretty well read post over on calm in the chaos (great name). As someone that has been doing Flex development since the 1.5 days, here’s what I’ll tell you.

One, Flex is a great brand. I love the Flex brand. It’s not going away and in fact we want the community to embrace that brand. Things like the Flex Show and 360 Flex should show that we really support the community using the Flex brand. But anyone that has done Flex development over the past 5 years knows that there’s been some confusion over the kinds of apps that you’re building. Flex apps? Flash apps? They use the Flex Framework but they still run on the Flash Player. Even though you may not have used Flash Professional to build them.

So here’s the deal. The Flash Platform is going to be all encompassing. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Flex exclusively or Flash Professional exclusively – we’re all building Flash applications. Everything we create ultimately compiles down to the SWF format. That’s the Flash Platform. And Adobe has a ton of tools that target the Flash platform. We’ve got Flash Professional, we’ve got Flash Catalyst, we’ve got Flex Builder, we’ve got ancillary projects like Alchemy. Imagine all of those tools working seamlessly together. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had one single brand of tools to use to target the platform? Wouldn’t that help clear up some of the confusion in the community? And the think about the strength of that brand for developers as we move into the mobile space. Ultimately I think this helps bring together everyone that’s building anything on the Flash Platform.

Roundup of the Flash Catalyst News

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I was lucky enough to be a part of the MAX Day 2 keynote where we showed off Flash Catalyst so I’ve been surfing around collecting the feedback. Here’s the good stuff I’ve found so far.

Thanks to everyone who’s posting info about Flash Catalyst. I’m hoping to do some screencast and tutorials in the next couple of weeks so that those of you who are playing with the MAX build can get started quickly.

The Flash Platform (again) and Hello Flash Catalyst

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Gotta love the press cycle. Even though the keynote isn’t for another couple of hours, we’re going to be announcing the Flash Platform. Those of you who have been with us since the beginning may have a feeling of deja vu. You aren’t alone. Yes we’ve talked about the Flash Platform before. This time I think it’s more meaningful. One, we’re bringing all of the tools together under a single brand – which is going to help the confusion that comes with Flex versus Flash. Flex remains a great brand and it’s the face of our open source framework, but aligning the tools under one brand is going to help bring everyone that creates SWF content together.

And that’s why I’m excited and glad that “Thermo” is becoming a part of the Flash brand under the name Flash Catalyst. It bridges both worlds – the Flex world and the Flash world – into one tool. It connects our Creative Suite 4 tools with our developer tools. And that’s significant. As someone who’s been doing Flex for a long time, I can tell you that Flash Catalyst will completely change the way you think about building Flex applications. Part of it is great design-develop workflow but it’s also the fact that Flash Catalyst works very closely with the CS4 design tools. You get the development power of the Flex Framework, the design power of the CS4 tools, and the deployment/interactive power of the Flash platform. That’s a big deal.

Also, 64-bit Flash Player for Linux. Boo-yeah. Go Adobe. Go MAX.

Mark Anders Thermo Demo from 360|Flex

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Ted just posted a video of the day 1 keynote at 360|Flex in which Mark Anders shows off Thermo as well as FXG and Flash Player 10. It’s a great overview of the future of Flex and Flash and also a nice sneak peak of Thermo. I’m really excited to watch all of you guys play with Thermo. It’s been a fun and hard problem to solve. We’re also trying to be very open and transparent. We want to get your hands on it as early as possible, so we’re planning to make the bits available as soon as possible. The build probably won’t have the full bells and whistles, and the actual product release is still a ways off, but I think you’ll enjoy jumping in and kicking the tires while helping us drive features for the product as we march on to a 1.0 release.

My “Thermo” Talk at MAX

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I’m giving a few talks in the next couple of months, but with all due respect to the 360Flex guys, the one I’m most excited about is my MAX talk – Next-Generation Flex Authoring: In Depth. I’m not a huge fan of the title (and it may change) but I’m going to be providing walkthroughs and demos of Thermo and Flex Builder Next. If you’re interested in how to use Flex Builder and Thermo to collaborate between designers and developers, you’ll want to catch the session.

And what’s even better is that it’s a Monday session. That leaves you the rest of the week to attend Serge and NJ’s session on Creative Design for Flex Applications. They’re doing a 90 minute lab/workshop deep dive so you’ll be able to jump in and start messing with Thermo. Between my session and that lab, you should be all set to Thermoize your life. MAX is going to be kick ass this year and I can guarantee you that between Flex and Thermo, MAX is going to be ground zero for really revolutionizing the designer-developer workflow. And we’ve got a few surprises with regards to the platform and workflow that I think are going to make people very happy.

Here’s to better looking, more engaging applications.

Flex Next! – FXG, New States, and More: the Gumbo Has Landed

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A few minutes ago we posted a new build of the Flex SDK which includes a lot of the stuff we’re doing for Flex Next. This is your first chance to jump in and start playing with Flex Next features. A couple of my favorites are FXG and the new states model.

Ely Greenfield has a good video on Adobe TV about the new designer/developer workflow in Flex 4. We’re making a ton of improvements around the designer/developer workflow. That includes FXG, it includes Thermo, and it includes making it easier to work with our current design tools.

Now that it’s live, I’m going to be trying to do a ton of content/tutorials/info about how to use these. Right now I’m working on an online/offline sync demo for my talk at 360|Flex, but if this stuff interests you and you haven’t registered for MAX yet, you should – *hint*.

Notes from the Evangelist Offsite

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Update: Wow, this ended up being really long.

All of the evangelists at Adobe had an offsite today in New York and it was one of the coolest days I’ve had at Adobe. Obviously I can’t get into a bunch of what we talked about but the team had really great in depth meetings with a bunch of products that are semi-public and that you should already know about. We had meetings with the Thermo team, the Pacifica team, the CoCoMo team, and some inter-evangelist presentations on ColdFusion and LiveCycle.

For me as an evangelist and Adobe employee it was great because we got completely free access to ask questions of all these teams and got a full picture across many business units of how all of our technologies are coming together. For you as developers and designers I think there are a bunch of interesting things on the horizon.

Adobe does so many damn things that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. The fact that we picked those three teams to talk to should tell you something. They’re all on the cutting edge of Adobe’s plans and should enable you guys to take RIAs to the next level.

Thermo
I’ll start with Thermo. You’ve heard a bunch about Thermo, so I won’t try to rehash all of that here. We’re building a tool that we think is going to appeal to a wide range of designers – even those not building Flex applications today. Thermo is also a way to help get the Flex Framework out to more people. Flex makes it easy to do some very powerful things with RIAs. Thermo will let designers bring a new level of expressiveness to the framework so that you’ll be able to create very visually appealing applications but with a lot of “under the hood” functionality. Being able to essentially customize Flex applications at the level of our Creative Suite tools is going to let you combine a great rich data story with a great user experience and bring all parts of Adobe’s platform together. Think of all the stuff Flex does well on the developer side, then think about being able to let designers in that process. Thermo is going to be a big tool for the platform.

Pacifica
The second meeting was with Pacifca. High quality voice inside the player is a big deal by itself. And our goal is to let developers bring that into their applications very easily. We want voice to be as much a part of the experience as text is today. A lot of RIAs could benefit from easy, high quality voice. It won’t be a fit for every application but if you can call voice APIs just as easily as you can call Math APIs then you can start to expand your own RIAs quite a bit. Not to mention the ability to call outside phone lines right from Flash. Merging the telephony and technology worlds is something that’s been popular for a long time but making that accessible to web developers hasn’t really been done before. I wasn’t trying to slight Ribbit here. They’re showing how cool this can be when you enable telephony and web developers. I was thinking more about point-to-point voice but that wasn’t clear. Sorry guys, Ribbit rules.

CoCoMo
Our CoCoMo meeting was also great. Connect is a really solid product. Half of my “sales” as an evangelist have been just showing off collaboration inside a Connect meeting using the Flash Player. By taking that and turning it into components that developers can use we’re going to help make real time collaboration a part of RIAs anywhere that it fits. You can just as easily add video chat or whiteboard functionality as you can create a new Panel in Flex. Think about the combination of Flex, Thermo, Pacifica, and CoCoMo inside of your applications and you’ll be able to create a real-time, collaborative experience that goes beyond text and video to be not only good looking, but more personal with voice and teamwork.

ColdFusion and LiveCycle
We also had Adam and Greg present ColdFusion and LiveCycle respectively. ColdFusion is in for some great things. Coté and I have talked a bit about an RIA middleware in our RIA Weekly podcasts and ColdFusion is making huge strides in that direction. One of the best quotes of the day was from Adam in describing ColdFusion as “instant SOA”. ColdFusion combines so many different aspects of technology and brings it together in a way that’s accessible anywhere. You can expose an SMS gateway as a REST service, use Flash Remoting to talk to XMPP or any other combination you can think of. LiveCycle takes that to the next level in a lot of ways. I always thought of LiveCycle as primarily a Document server (and that’s a big part) but it actually automates the workflow for basically anything you want to do. You can set up a process to receive an email and then based on the content do something with a PDF, send a Twitter message, or fire off an FTP command. It lets you work with a bunch of different services together in one workflow and create processes around it. It’s kind of cool to think about being able to take data and then turn it into a protected PDF, a Twitter message, or send it to a Flex application in one big sweep.

Most of this is already here and what isn’t here is coming pretty soon. The power of AIR, the Flash Player, and the Flex Framework enables a lot of very powerful data stories as well as a great user experience. Bringing our design tools, services, and developer technologies together means that all of this will be accessible to you to use in your own applications. Being able to take an application and add interactivity not just at the UI layer but at the data level is a huge leap. Our goal is to make that really easy for you so that you can quickly plug these things into what you’re doing today. Lowering the barrier to entry is half the battle and I think we’ve done that. Over the next few months I am excited to hear what you think and see what you build.

Thermo User Testing – The Board Game

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Rob Adams has been doing a bunch of user testing for Thermo and he has a post up that talks about the process. He describes it as “Thermo: The Board Game” and in reading it, that’s basically what it is because we’re using paper prototyping at the moment to see what works best for people. If you’re interested in the process or just user testing in general, it’s worth a read.