Flash Catalyst Presentation
Here’s my Flash Catalyst presentation slides and source files from this weekend’s Flex Camp Orange County. Along with the slides (which I partly borrowed from Ryan Stewart), I walked through the “next-gen” workflow of creating a design, bringing the design into Flash Catalyst, then taking that into Flex Builder 4 to add some data.
The app I walked through was kind of a social address book. Along with some basic interactions I added in some 3D flip action and a expandable drawer. It was a pretty simple example, but it was plenty to go through in the 40 minute time slot. You can view the final app here.
If you’re interested in walking through the workflow yourself, you can download the Illustrator CS4 file, Flash Catalyst FXP file, final Flex Builder source and slides in a single zip file: Get the Flash Catalyst Source files.
The turn out for Flex Camp Orange County was great! And who can resist Flex and AIR cupcakes from Two Parts Sugar. Thanks to Nahuel, Laura and Jeremy from ASFusion for putting things together, as well as Tom and John of 360|Conferences.
If you’re looking for the Degrafa presentation Tom Gonzalez and I gave, I’ll be posting it to the Degrafa blog, or you can see the slides here.
February 2nd, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Holy crap man. No offense but that code turns my stomach. Is that really what Flash Catalyst generates for that little component/app? How is that easier or more maintainable than using graphics?
February 2nd, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Hi Ben,
Yeah, all that was generated during the workflow of bringing artwork into Flash Catalyst from Illustrator. A lot of what you see in there is “duplicate code” for graphics used by Illustrator to interpret the graphics and render them (I think). You could literally delete a bunch of the MXML at the bottom of the file and the file would work fine in Flex, but then Illustrator couldn’t open it (I think). There may be a lot of ways the code that Catalyst generates will be optimized in the future, so we’ll see.
As far as pros and cons go, I wonder if in many cases you won’t even need to look at the skin MXML files, kind of like the way you would get PNGs or a SWC from a designer. The benefit over the PNGs and SWCs though is that you can go in and edit them and they aren’t static. On the other side, it can be a lot of code to wade through to find what you want. I experienced this during the presentation. With all the generic ids I couldn’t find the exact chunk of MXML I wanted to swap out. Then again, I was rushing
I’m withholding any hard judgements with the understanding that this is an early beta release of a 1.0 release of a “whole new” application. That said, I look forward to seeing how concerns like yours are addressed.
Juan