Adobe Developer Tech Day

On December 2, 2009 a meeting called “Adobe Developer Tech Day “was hold in Guangzhou and I took part in it. And now I am writing this article to share some points I knew from this meeting with all of you.

This meeting is mainly about some new tech, tools and frameworks of the flash platform including flex4, flashbuilder4, flash catalyst, Cairngorm and the drawing API in AS3.Most of the content in the meeting can be found on the website of the Adobe. And now I will list them all and you can visit these if you are interesting about these topics.

• what’s new in flex4:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex4sdk_whatsnew.html

• What’s new in flashbuilder4:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flashbuilder4_whatsnew.html

• Flash Catalyst:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/

 

And now I will write more details about one of these topics- the flash catalyst. This tool may be a wonderful tool for the colleagues of the integration team.

As we all know, when we develop a web site or a information system for a customer, the work flow maybe like that: firstly, the project manager will talked to the customer to know their demands and then write a documents about what this web site or information system should be like. Then the designer will make some design for it and show the design to the customer. if the customer is satisfied with the design, then the developer will begin to develop the system according to the document written by the project manager and the design made by the designer. When the developers finished their work the quality control team will test the system to make sure that the system runs well in the expected way and give some response to the developer.

The problems which may exist in the above work flow are that:

• It’s very hard for the designer to show their ideas to the customer. Because they can only show the customer the static image files but not the real application! For example, if the designer wants the customer to know what the menu will look like, he may show two pictures: the first one is about what the menu looks like before clicked and the second one is about what the menu looks like after clicked. But it is hard to let the customer to know what the menu will look like in the real application, for example what will be happened when the user click the menu? Should the items of the menu display immediately or some transition will be show first. For the designer, they may be very good at using Photoshop, but they may be not good at using JavaScript and Html. So it’s very hard for them to turn the design to real application.
• It’s very difficult for the developer to turn the design to the real application precisely. The developer can only get the static images from the designer, so some ideas of the designer’s will not be turn to reality when the developer turn the design to real application.

The flash catalyst can solve these problems perfectly! It can turn the designer’s ideas to the real application directly without any coding. Now I will give you a brief introduction about the usage of this powerful tool.

You can try this tool as the following steps:

• Step1: download the software from the website of Adobe: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/ or you can borrow the disk from me (Joey) or silver to install this software.
• Setp2: You can import the .psd or .ai file directly to the software or do the design in this software just like what you often do in the Photoshop. Here is the welcome interface:
• 

Or you can create a new project from the menu:

• Step3:You can see the follow videos on the website of adobe to new the basic usage of this software and it’s very easy for the designer who can use Photoshop to use this software. Here is the URL:

Introducing Flash Catalyst: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/tutorials/overview/

Wire Framing in Flash Catalyst:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/tutorials/wirefr/

Learn more visit this:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/

If you want to know more details about this meeting please don’t hesitate to write me an Email or have a communication with me in a face to face way!