Adobe® Flash Catalyst™

Adobe has officially announced that their professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content previously code named Thermo will go to market as Adobe Flash Catalyst. Flash Catalyst will certainly receive a lot of buzz at MAX this week as it has been one of the most anticipated products in recent memory.

Flash Catalyst enables artwork created in Adobe Creative Suite 4 to be imported with full fidelity and quickly converted into dynamic components such as buttons, scrollbars, input fields and more. Finished projects can be published directly to Flash Player or AIR. When combined with the next version of Flex Builder, Adobe Flash Catalyst enables design and development to be done in parallel. This workflow supports iterative development and delivers higher quality results with faster time to market. A preview release of Adobe Flash Catalyst will be available for MAX 2008 attendees. A public beta version is expected to be available on Adobe Labs in early 2009. For more information on Flash Catalyst please visit www.adobe.com/go/flashcatalyst.

Adobe Flex® Builder™

The next iteration of Flex Builder code named Gumbo will also be available for MAX attendees. Gumbo is a key part of the design, develop workflow and plays nicely with Flash Catalyst. Other improvements include new IDE productivity features like getter/setter generation, event code generation, the new Package Explorer, and support for ASDoc tooltips. Gumbo also supports creating custom file templates for MXML, ActionScript, and CSS.

Gumbo also adds two important new features for testing applications; network monitor, and Flex Unit support. The network monitor allows you to see the network traffic between the Flash client and your backend server from within Gumbo itself. This enables you to more easily debug data access portions of the Flex application, and to diagnose any performance issues that might exist between the client and server. Unit testing is another important part of the application development process and Gumbo makes it easy with Flex Unit support. This will allow test setup, test file creation, test running and test result analysis in Gumbo.

The final theme is all about data-centric application development. While many Flex applications are built with elaborate design for public facing consumer sites, many more are data intensive business applications for use within corporate firewalls - data dashboards, forms processing, content management, and so on. These kinds of applications typically employ logic on the back end written in a scripting language like PHP or ColdFusion, or .NET or Java, or web services. Prior to Gumbo, it was sometimes challenging for developers to connect to these different back-end systems and manage the data within a Flex application. But a brand new approach to using data in Flex will change all that.

The new Client Data Management (CDM) feature super-simplifies how you work with data on the server. Using the new Services Explorer in Gumbo, you can now bind UI components in your application to operations on the server. CDM then manages a CDM data store bound to this operation, allowing on-demand fetching of data for easy and efficient scrolling through large collections of data, change tracking allowing users to “un-do” actions, and automation of the common CRUD (create, read, update, & delete) functions that usually need to be hand-coded. Creating, updating, and deleting data is done within the CDM data store so that when you’re ready to update the back end system, a single call to the client data management’s commit() method handles synchronizing all of the changes for you. It all works against multiple server types (like ColdFusion, PHP, as well as SOAP and XML over HTTP) and produces straightforward Actionscript interfaces that you can use yourself, or simply let the tool do the work for you.

Adobe® AIR™ 1.5

Adobe also announced today the availability of Adobe® AIR™ 1.5, a key component of the Adobe Flash Platform, which enables Web developers to deliver rich Internet applications outside the browser. Offering new features and performance improvements to create more expressive AIR applications, Adobe AIR 1.5 incorporates the open source WebKit HTML engine and now accelerates application performance with “SquirrelFish,” the new WebKit JavaScript interpreter. Adobe AIR 1.5 also includes a new, encrypted database that meets enterprise security compliance requirements while storing data securely on customers’ computers. Additionally, AIR 1.5 includes functionality introduced in Adobe Flash Player 10, such as support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, and extensible rich text layout. Adobe AIR 1.5 is available immediately as a free download for Windows and Mac, and AIR 1.5 for Linux is expected to be available before the end of the year. For more information on Adobe AIR, please visit www.adobe.com/products/air/.

Adobe® Flash® Player 10 for 64-bit Linux

Although small (but growing), the 64-bit Linux community has been very outspoken about the lack of a Flash player that could run naively on their operating system.

Well, apparently Adobe has been listening as they have a pre-release version of Adobe Flash Player 10 now available for download on Adobe Labs at  www.adobe.com/go/linux64player.

Installing this new player will remove the need for the slower and sometimes buggy emulation of the 32-bit player that was previously required to run the Flash player in a 64-bit Linux environment. I personally know a couple of people who will be very happy about this announcement.

Adobe® Flash® Player for Smartphones

Last but certainly not least, a preview of Adobe Flash Player 10 for smartphones will be demonstrated at MAX 2008, which will reveal the latest advancements related to the Open Screen Project. www.openscreenproject.org At the time of this posting, it is not yet know which smart phone (s) will be demonstrated but I don't believe it will include the iPhone. I know I am in the minority, but as a G1 owner, I am pulling for Flash Player support for Android. :-)

UPDATE: Well the news came out this morning that Adobe is working with chip-designer ARM Holdings to optimize the Flash Player to run on ARM chips. This is significant as ARM chips are are used in many cell phones from Nokia, Apple, and Samsung. ARM and Adobe hope to have a new line of ARM-based processors that are optimized for Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR available in the second half of 2009.

Read more from Rich Tretola.