Flash Catalyst Quick Links

Designer-developer workflow enhancements with Flash Catalyst by Elad Elrom 

This is a great summary of the challenges the Flash Catalyst (FC) faces as it attempts to solve the Designer-Developer workflow problem. Given how complex this problem is, Elad provides some clear thoughts on how FC can ease this transition. For me the key point was to think of your application in smaller custom components. As a Developer/Designer, I find the best way to solve development problems is to break the entire task down into smaller chunks. The same process can be applied to using FC. By doing so, the output should be more usable by a development, which will in all likelyhood, refactor the code to fit their development model. But by providing smaller elements, this integration should happen smoother and facilitate revisions.

Adobe Flash Catalyst best practices by Andrew Shorten

In this article, Andrew give some advice on configuring your Adobe Illustrator files so that Flash Catalyst interpret them easier. I mentioned the need for visual designers to take care in creating their assets. Remember “Layer 3 copy” doesn’t help the workflow.

Design Prototyping: Bringing Wireframes to Life

I found this talk on Design Prototyping by Dan Harrelson of Adaptive Path that was given at the MIX ‘09 conference. For those who don’t know what MIX is, it is a Microsoft sponsored conference (basically the MS version of Adobe’s MAX). 

Here is the summary of the talk:

See how “design prototyping” differs from other techniques, and learn how to determine when a prototype is needed. Understand how to tailor your prototype to a particular audience, gather techniques for bringing paper sketches to life, and how interactive sketching can fit in an Agile process.

Now you don’t not need to install Silverlight to view the video, there is Mp4 version available.

Quick Tip: Styling your Flex project

Rachel Luxemburg tweeted this: “Extremely cool Flash visualization app: Personas from MIT — http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html – see yourself as the Web sees you!” 

The application is very well done, I spent some time playing with various name besides my own. But what struck me, was although the developer spent some much time with this very cool visualization, they forgot to take care of the “Flash of Flex Teal”.

For those who aren’t familiar with this ‘effect’. It is the brief display of the default Flex teal before the actual Flex application begins its initialization and rendering.

How every this effect is easily remove by add an additional parameter to the compiler argument list. To do this select Properties from the Project Menu. The following window will appear:

Choose the Compiler options from the list, then add the following arguement

-default-background-color #000000

In this case, our application will start with black instead of the default teal.

Flex SDK security update

Flex SDK security update posted: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-13.html Users of Flex 3.3 SDK and earlier versions take note and update!

Adobe MAX Update

Just to let you know that the early bird pricing for Adobe MAX (October 4–7 in Los Angeles, California) is ending soon. Register by August 31, 2009, and get US$200 off the regular price of a full conference pass. 

If you do plan to go, please us this link, so I can get credit from Adobe. If 5 people register this way, I will have a free pass that I can raffle off since Qualcomm is covering my ticket. I only need one more person.

50+ Important Flash Platform Developers

Sean Moore (aka Sean the Flex Guy), has posted a list of 50+ Important Flash Platform developers. The question is what the hell is this guy:

doing on the list.

Seriously, it is quite an honor to be mentioned, thanks Sean!