Showing is better than telling and I’ve put together a quick recording of Adobe Flash Catalyst in action. In four minutes you will see an Adobe Illustrator CS4 file turned into a Flash application reading for import into the new Flash Builder 4.

Another version of this demo with automated zoom is available here.

Like what you see? Download the preview release from labs.adobe.com

Today on labs.adobe.com, Adobe made available preview releases of the next version of two  tools in the Adobe Flash Platform. Of these two tools, one is an upgrade from a previous version (Flash Builder), and another is a completely new tool (Flash Catalyst).

Flash Catalyst is an incredible new tool from Adobe that aims to bridge the gap between developer & designer workflows. Traditionally designers hand over artwork as still images or “sliced up” assets to a development team that then need to go ahead and attempt to reassemble the assets as intended. I say attempt, as often it is very time consuming if not impossible for a developer to recreate the intent the designer had.

Designers can now continue to use familiar tools such as Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator to design, then use Flash Catalyst to add interaction to their design while at the same time moving the project into something a developer can use. Flash Catalyst converts artwork into a Flex project which can be opened up in Flash Builder and extended by developers. Continue Reading

Last week I made a quick note of the release of Tour De LiveCycle, an Adobe AIR application that provided a quick reference to a wealth of material & documentation for newcomers and experienced users of Adobe’s LiveCycle ES.

Adobe have released another free tool called LiveCycle Café, another AIR application focused on LiveCycle, but this one focused on providing timely news, access to events, forums, notes and even an RSS Reader.

Download LiveCycle Café from Adobe.

My latest round of presentations across Australia have been based on the topic of “Lowering your costs while increasing business efficiency”. Clearly in the current economic climate we’ve seen many projects put on hold due to budget cuts, yet a more agile approach would be to start with some quick wins that were aligned to the “future vision”.

In the presentation I covered four key areas;

• Collaborating in real time in live meetings & training
• Requesting reviews & feedback of information with tracking
• Managing & controlling your content inside & outside of your organisation
• Using forms & process to collect structured information

Using a combination of Adobe Acrobat, Connect & LiveCycle ES technologies I showed many examples of how organisations can improve their business in a matter of days & weeks, rather than months and years. In fact, most of the case studies shown went live in around 6 weeks. Allowing business people to create more content and interact with each other in more engaging ways than just email has immediate benefits, without extensive training.

Here are my slides;

Apart from making the slides available, below is a link to the PDF Portfolio that was sent out to the attendees. Be patient as it’s a 95Mb download (chock full of videos) but all you need to view it is Adobe Reader 9.

Adobe Breakfast Presentation – PDF Portfolio

Have you ever wanted to learn about Adobe LiveCycle ES but weren’t quite sure where to get started? Perhaps you thought you knew everything there was to know but didn’t realise that there was more to LiveCycle ES than the Designer tool that comes with Acrobat?

Tour de LiveCycle is an Adobe AIR application that you can download as a desktop reference guide that pools a massive amount of LiveCycle information into one quick handy place.

Simple click on this install badge to install it now!

Tour De LiveCycle was created by Adobe’s Greg Wilson, creator of Tour de Flex, and assisting Greg with the content was Australia’s very own Avoka Technologies, an Adobe Solution Partner and experts in all things LiveCycle.