Adobe Flash Catalyst & Images of Simon Plant

Well Welcome to this wonderful, wacky Wednesday… OK yea, I threw “wacky” in there because I thought I was on a “W” roll for a moment, actually that reminds me of a pretty funny moment with one of my cousins which is completely NOT related with design, but maybe typography. My cousin was a few years old and learning the alphabet quite well with my Aunt showing him the letters and he eagerly would respond “that’s F!” or “that’s R!” and on and on until they got to-you guessed it- “W” to which he responded “that’s double ME!”. Ahh good times, but yes as promised totally unrelated to design.

Adobe Flash Catalyst:

Adobe rolled out Adobe Flash Catalyst Beta at the beginning of this month. I heard about it and looked into it a little and really liked what I saw. Basically Flash Catalyst is a program geared to designers who want to get in on the Flash fun without all the actionscript. Flash Catalyst does a great job of allowing you to import designs and layouts from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and even Fireworks and preserve the layer order and further allow you to work with those layers and even add new elements. Interactivity can be added with ease, it’s merely a click or two of the mouse! After you have completed your masterpiece you can deploy (The fancy word for “export” or “save out to”) to the Flash Player or Adobe AIR. Very, very cool program from the folks at Adobe and I am sure most designers (and even some non-designers) will enjoy this program quite a bit.

You can download Flash Catalyst right here!

Check out a few screenshots from me working in Catalyst below.

Flash Catalyst! Click to open (you really needed that didn’t you?)

When you open Flash Catalyst it allows you to open a project, or start a new one from Photoshop or Illustrator.

Here I have imported the “myPhone” iPhone created in Photoshop with all its layers.

Make something happen when the slide button is pressed! In this case it will move to the next scene which is empty. This will make the phone disappear when the button is pressed.

Previewing… a browser window opens shortly hereafter and you get to test run your application!

Remember you can deploy this to Adobe Flash Player OR Adobe AIR so there is a lot of cool potential for Catalyst!

You can download Flash Catalyst right here!

Simon Plant:

Simons a great guy, great photographer and has been giving me a few free tutorials here and there to upload to my YouTube account, matter of fact I just checked and I have three I need to get up there! Anyway he sells a whole bunch of great high quality video tutorials/courses through his site. I strongly urge you to check them out they are inexpensive and hey, why not support a great photographer?!

Go ahead and send some love his way, way “across the pond” in the UK. Click here to check out the tutorials he offers with some cool preview videos as well!