I actually got a version of it at Adobe MAX. And to answer your question NO WAY! When Flash Catalyst finally takes off, it will open up a new segment of designers to dabble in Flash. But this will only benefit RIA designers and developers by taking some of the weight off their shoulders. Flash Professional will still be used by advanced ActionScripters and animators, mainly because Flash Catalyst will only have rudimentary animation available, and the Flex framework currently has a base file size of around 300-400K... meaning you won't be using it to build advertisements. Flash Professional CS4, on the other hand, has beefed up it's repertoire of tools... I think Flash CS4 alone, will make it more accessible to designers than previous versions of Flash.

The bottom line is the lines are being blurred. Flash Catalyst will be the Powerpoint of the Flash Platform. (I'm not trying to mean folks.) It is just as important to the Flash Platform, because it will allow designers to create SWFs when they didn't have or want the technical skills necessary to build them before.

They still have a long way to go though, and I'm sure they will be adding a ton of features. In the mean time... check out Flash CS4. It frickin rocks!

will Catalyst only benefit the designer working on RIA's? or can it be used to create simple websites too?

Actually, this product frightens me a little, as a UI developer. The thing is, creatives aren't really UI experts... they are messaging design experts who are mostly concerned with two things: the marketing message and their portfolios. I know this because before I was a developer I was a designer (I also have a BFA in sculpture). On the other end of the spectrum are server engineers, who are only concerned about the machine. The one person among all of the stakeholders in the development of an application that is truly concerned about - and has expertise to serve the needs of - the user is the UI developer.

Unfortunately, both designers and SEs often have antagonistic relationships with UI developers, each from their own perspective seeing them as a hindrance, rather than a compliment to their own skills: designers see us as 'technicians' always 'tearing their designs down' and SEs see us as... 'designers'. Neither appreciates that the role is not just technical; it's actually quite an art to tie all the stakeholders' interests together to deliver a usable product.

I think Adobe is giving a power to designers they don't really deserve to wield, given that they are not really user-oriented, and relegating UI developers, who made ActionScript the success it is, to being integration technicians. I think we'll see a glut of bland apps coming out of this tool, as well as a lot of bloated, not-very-usable ones if it catches on.

BTW, in response to another poster, using mxmlc, the command-line compiler, it's actually possible to get an optimized Flex app with a base size of about 50K, with an RSL of the flex framework riding along for about 53K with a one-time load. Wouldn't know that if I wasn't a 'technician'.

Truly remarkable UX is only possible with a human at the helm of the presentation tier. I've been hoping for more integration between the traditional 'creative' stack and the Macromedia-acquired 'web' stack for a while, but I'm kind of scratching my head over this approach to it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'm wrong and it won't bode as poorly for good UX/UI as I think it will.

6145466477, is the player cache the same thing as a signed RSL (SWZ)? I like the link but didn't see any info about how to implement it on the command-line or in a flex-config. Yeah, it's actually about 44K when you include the framework.swc library as an RSL. The strange thing is that if you statically link it, the combined total of base app plus framework is around 185K, as opposed to 44 + 43 separately.

I definitely hear you about designers throwing assets over the wall. I'm dealing with that headache as we speak on yet another death march project that resulted from the perfect storm of late creative and difficulty integrating assets. We were going to do all the creative with a skinning library I developed previously, but to save time (because the deadlines are immovable, but not for creative, so as usual technology has to pay the price for slow production) went with FLA integration. Although it will still save time over the vector approach, I'm having to do a ton of production work to make the FLAs digestible by our application. I tried to advocate for tight control over the creatives to get the assets delivered in a strictly defined fashion, and versioning, but neither flew, no surprise. So I'm back to doing the old-fashioned, time-gobbling approach of making changes manually in my re-organized FLA when the designer throws changes over the wall.

I'm similarly skeptical about optimization.

What I don't want to see out of Adobe... more application sprawl. I appreciate the great new features touted by the Catalyst team, and the tight mxml integration, but I think that an effort must be made to integrate this stuff into Flash. There is waaay too much overlap in Adobe's products lately. As the Suite grows larger, more expensive, more confusing, and with new versions being released at such a rapid pace, it is becoming harder to justify the costs and large learning curve of the Flash platform to my company. For my freelance web work, I've dropped Flash almost entirely as a solution due to the built-in capabilities of modern browsers using only the old technologies we're forced to keep current with anyway (html/css/js).

Don't get me wrong, I'm an Adobe fan... I'd just like to see some consolidation where it makes sense.

@ssedlmayr
@captkeebz1

I think you both hit the nail on the head. I was completely flabbergasted when Thermo (now catalyst) was announced. Being a long time designer turned Actionscript programmer I was lured into the Flex world by drag drop video tutorials. Flash couldn't easily deliver on the high level coding front, so flex came out, YAY! Unfortunately my excitement waned by being disappointed by the horrible eclipse based IDE, swf file size (flex 2), meager component set (still no video player and so much more), and framework constraints. My biggest disappointment came from the ridiculous hoops needed to jump through in order to create a "smooth" designer/developer workflow.

The problem with the designer/developer workflow between flash/flex currently is that the designer really needs to have a good understanding of the flex framework and available component set, their limitations, and design to those constraints. More times than I can count I've worked with designers who come up with interesting or complex UI concepts that could only be implement by basically starting from the UIComponent and working your way up from there. I thought Flex was supposed to give us a leg up from coding a movieclip from the ground up to produce something unique? Maybe in some cases it does, but not in the really creative cases. From my perspective, Flex easily creates extremely vanilla Visual Studio, style apps. (obviously there are exceptions as some people have the time, resources to massage an application to look super sick).

I've actually stopped working in Flex these days and gone back to compiling everything in the flash IDE or using ANT and working off the Stage or out of the library as we did in the old days. Doing this, I can actually work with my most creative designers much much easier.

Why would adobe build a new product to do what Flash should have evolved to do? Flash can import illustrator, fireworks, and photoshop files and create graphical assets easily. Why wouldn't the additional MXML behind the scenes code writing functionality be built into Flash? Why wouldn't Adobe create a new window or menu item for defining stage assets as vertical or horizontal scroll bars? Is a new "Bridge" application really the answer? How much will it cost? I already had to give my first born to Rumplestiltskin for the last upgrade.

Taking a look at the UI for the Catalyst in the videos on Labs only confirms my fear about learning yet another toolset, menu structure, etc. under the guise of improving workflow. Just like Flex, I'm sure some use cases will, in fact, benefit greatly from the tool.

Here's my $0.02

I would love to see Adobe focus some seriously heavy resources on creating more and more useful high level components that actually integrate with the designer work flow. Designers building new interfaces want to incorporate whatever the hot widgets of the day are and customize them to their application. If Adobe makes it so ridiculously easy to create seriously advanced applications using cutting edge components or code libraries, then there is still a reason to use flash over ajax and js not to mention the actually innovative applications that might start popping up.