Continuing from the Day 2 Key Note's under the Design category is the much anticipated Flash Catalyst (formerly Thermo) product.
Fc is positioned as a design tool for the rapid creation of interactive user interfaces with little to no coding. It's a tool that bridges the gap between the designers and developers by leveraging design assets (PSDs, Illustrator files, etc...) from tools designers use (the CS4 suite) to a format that Flex developers could use.
Fc addresses a lot of problems in the Design to Developer workflow, and a lot of those are pretty obvious. For example taking static design compositions from Designers, as a Developer you then burn a lot of time trying to slice it apart into a format you can use – and heavy forbid the design changes. Even small changes can involved redoing it all over again.
CS3 and FB3 did improve some of that with easier to skin controls, but how far you could go was still fairly limited. To make Fc truly successful, the whole platform needed to be evolved. Quite a monumental effort because we're talking about many of the CS4 products, Flex, and Flash. So getting CS4 and Flash Player 10 was the first step to that, and following up will be Flex Builder 4 (Gumbo) and Catalyst.
Part Fc's success will come from this workflow round trip capability of being able to open an asset in it's native tool (e.g. Illustrator), copying it to the clipboard, and then in Catalyst pasting it in. But, if you need to make modifications using that object's natural tooling you just right on it, select edit, make the changes in the appropriate tool and you're good to go. What makes this possible is this new common interchange file format called FXG.
Catalyst uses the same theme as the rest of the CS4 products, so as a Designer you'll be used to common elements such as layers and what not. You simple import assets from whatever tool, and literally convert any graphical asset on a layer into any kind of object.
And when you're done, you export it into this FXP format (Flex 4 Project), that Flex Builder will completely recognize. As a developer, you can then focus on hooking in remaining business logic, data access, etc... They imply that it's possible for the Designer to update their Design without impacting the Developer, though that part I'm not quite sure how that would work.
So all that solves some of the gaps between Designers and Developers, but here's the clincher. Designers could only model static compositions and then bounce those over as jpegs/pngs to the developers. But they couldn't model the actual interaction (the transitions from one page to another, and how things hide and become visible, etc...). Catalyst gives Designers the ability to do this too.
Previously, it'd be up to the Developer to hook in the transitions, effects, and interactions. With Catalyst, it allows the Designer to focus on the experience side of things, and frees up the Developer to focus on the logic.
Good stuff.
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