What’s New in Flash Catalyst CS5.5

With Flash Catalyst CS5.5 and Flash Builder 4.5, a true collaborative designer-developer workflows are now possible. Designers and developers can pass FXP and FXPL files back and forth as needed between Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder.

See Workflows between Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder.

Designing applications for a variety of screen sizes is a huge challenge that designers face. Flash Catalyst CS5.5 allows designers to define constraints that control how applications and components adjust when they appear on screens with different sizes and resolutions.

See Resizing Applications and Components.

Components allow designers to quickly design functional, interactive wireframes, which can later be skinned or modified by a developer. Flash Catalyst CS5.5 includes new components in a new common library panel.

See Common library.

Designers can now efficiently craft the visual appearance for developer-built custom components without the need to understand their underlying code or logic.

See Custom skinnable components.

When you convert artwork to a component, or when you double-click a wireframe component in order to skin it, that component is added tothe library panel. In Flash Catalyst CS5, these components were named automatically (i.e., Button1, Button2, etc.). In Flash Catalyst CS5.5, anytime you convert artwork to a component or you attempt to skin a wireframe component, a dialog appears, asking you to name the component. In this way, the components that appear in your library are organized and named, making it easier to work with the project.

See Naming components.

Flash Catalyst CS5.5 makes it even easier to mock up functional wireframes by enabling you to easily replace objects on the artboard. See Replacing repeated artwork.

Flash Catalyst CS5.5 features a new Align panel, similar to that found in other Adobe design applications such as Illustrator.

See Aligning graphics.

Flash Catalyst CS5.5 includes a newly enhanced Timeline panel that includes a new scrollbar to make it easier to navigate long transitions.

See Animations.

Flash Catalyst CS5.5 provides you with more powerful interaction possibilities, including the ability to trigger interactions with double click and the ability to target any component within the application.

See Create navigation and behavior with interactions.

Flash Catalyst CS5 introduced the Design Time Data panel, allowing designers to create mock data sets to simulate a connection to a data source. A developer could then open the file in Flash Builder 4 and replace the mock data with a connection to a live database.

With Flash Catalyst CS5.5, a designer can now take the file back from the developer, keeping the data connection in the Data List component intact, and alter the component’s visual appearance within Catalyst. Running the project from Flash Catalyst will display the real, live data within the Data List component.

See Overview of data lists.