In case you missed all the adjectives in the title, Rombla is a powerful online WYSIWYG flash-site building RIA. Created and hosted by the folks at Piria, the app is geared towards bridging the gap between web designers and their clients. Who needs a CMS when you can give your clients a tool that lets them see the site as it is, make the simple changes they want, and republish it immediately?

Rombla is a full-featured flash-site creation tool. It gives you every tool you'd need to build a simple site in flash, and gives your clients complete control to make their own updates to those simple things like phone numbers and addresses they hate paying you to fix. Rombla also hosts the application for you (for free, at the moment), and provides a few simple buttons up top to view your published site, publish your edits, and revert to previously saved versions of the page. They allow you to pick whatever sub-domain url you want for your site, though for now it's always .rombla.com for now (the app says you'll be able to publish to your own domain soon.)

Rombla was announced at the Adobe MAX conference by Piria. Here's a link to their press release, if you're into that sort of thing.

I took one of the more complex templates for a spin and customized it to talk about some of my favorite things in about 10 minutes. Here's the site I made, and here's the original template.

Rombla's interface is easy to navigate and fairly straight-forward. The editor sits within an intuitive tabbed-menu that brings up different objects you can add to your page in a column on the left. A column to the right of the main editing canvas allows you to modify properties on whatever object you have selected, and clicking any object in the main editor allows you to make whatever changes you need.

Rombla's editing interface

One really nice feature in Rombla is that the interface itself is responsive while editing. For example, menu buttons are edited through the "site" tab. Clicking them while working in any other tab navigates to that section of the page, making it easy to navigate around your site. Scroll bars and other controls like this are also live.

Little usability things like this make Rombla a great tool to use. Rombla manages to pull off a pretty robust web-site creation tool without the use of any tool bar, meaning things just work the way you'd expect them to most of the time. Rombla isn't the Flash authoring tool, and it doesn't try to be a graphics editing tool. It gives you full control of the different objects on your page and gives you good tools to edit them (full control over text, lots of complex layouts for images and navigation, support for third party widgets like flickr and youtube feeds, etc.) It does what it's made for very well, and doesn't get bogged down attempting to do anything else.

My complaints about Rombla are few. Most would be related to performance - it was a little sluggish and crashed a few times on my machine, but then again I'm running a Mac and the Flash Player on Mac has been known to flake out a lot faster than on the PC. Little other things feel rough around the edges, like some focus rectangles that get out of sync and controls that sometimes move while I'm editing them, but I'm sure those little bugs will get worked out as the application matures.

I've been chatting with the Rombla crew a little since meeting them out at MAX. Watch this space for an update later this week or next with more details about how the application was developed and Piria's plans for the future (AIR application?)