>At the recent Flex Summit, Adobe annouced that they are no longer developing Flash Catalyst,

No design view anymore , no catalyst ?? Than we leave the flex world ?

Source please

>This is unfair.

I lost my trust in Adobe either.

From now on I try to avoid ADOBE products!

There is also another solution called "Hype".

http://tumultco.com/hype/ <- cheap

or wakanda which can be found here: http://www.wakanda.org/features/studio <--FREE

muse + edge (with multiple scenes/states) + the ability to add custom code would be nice.

But the subscription pricing model of Muse is a abolut NO-Go

But Muse + Edge do NOT let you so easily create Webpages with dynamic content as it is possible with Catalyst + Flash Builder.

Creating JavaScript Widgets is less fun that creating skins with Catalyst and implement the logic in FB

I'm very new to Adobe. A convert from the Visual Basic side wanting to develop professional development content for my school district. I've spent my winter vacation learning Catalyst as an experiment. Brings me to this forum and the apparent demise of a tool I have just come to love!  So goes life. I listened to the link you suggested. Thanks, really interesting view of the inner workings of concept development! 

On to my point. As a novice, I'm mystified about what "no longer developing" really means for Catalyst users. Since I use it as a stand alone application (glorified PPT....because that's where I'm coming from...) should I be greatly concerned about its death if I use it just as a learning interaction tool that is light enough for the web?

I had planned to convince my district to train a team of teachers to shift to Catalyst instead of PPT as we move to more in house, web-based teacher training. Integration with FB was only a  future  consideration. Have any thoughts about what direction we could take? Continue to explore current incarnation of Catalyst as a stand alone or abandon ship before we leave port? By the way, I have been using Captivate but I like Catalyst as a quick and easy replacement for PPT.

Thoughts from other members are greatly appreciated

In conjunction FC and FB are unbeatable. There "was" no replacement R.I.P

Alone that you could visually built spark skins is a nice thing

>HTML5 is not equal to Flex. I don't care how people try to spin it.

Exactly, looks like that only Marketing Guys or People who do not knw a thing about coding (like Steve Jobs) hype it.

OOP and Bulding LARGE RIAs is just tedious.

excellent words:

I've used (or tried to use in real projects) Flash Catalyst extensively. It had some real promise, but VERY little actual use in real world projects.

I've been in the business long enough to have seen dozens of these types of products that attempt to bridge design and programming.. The problem with this is that it hard to make hard things simple. Invariably, the tools that attempt to do this become so complex themselves, you might as well be coding in the first place.

There are so many examples of this on the MS platform, with various "designers " tools that are really more marketing tools to convince managment to buy them to let business analysts and graphic designers feel all warm and cuddly that they can actually have role in the project.

The fact is that building interactive software requires many different skills and a properly managed team and frameworks that can be repeated on multiple projects, not fancy tools. In general, run far away from any products that say it will make something that is hard simple