Wow. I am really excited to get my hands on this piece of software revealed today at the Adobe MAX Conference in San Fransisco this week (and jealous of my co-workers who got to go!).

Basically what it does is streamline workflow for Rich Internet Applications and interactive apps from design to development. The designer can mock-up an beautiful looking interface and begin to simple markup defining what each element’s functionality does. Functionally seems to be based on layers from Photoshop or Illustrator. One button gets it’s own layer. Bring it into Catalyst, select that layer and define it as a button - even modify it’s mouse over and out states much like the old Image Ready, except seemingly much simpler.

From there it can be imported into Flex to be developed into a full fledged app for distribution online or as an AIR app. The developer adds in all the business logic and advanced functionality.

Oh yeah, all the while you can go in and make change say in a button color and it’ll update across the board without distributing code. Doesn’t seem like things need to be re-imported as well. Awesome!

However, I don’t honestly see designers making too much use out of this - at least not in a larger shop where a designer and developers roles are well defined. Much like a designer handing a PSD over to a developer without and slices. If anything it’ll help developers quickly build their applications based on (hopefully) well organized designs as well as rapidly prototyping projects for client presentations or iterative “Agile-methodology” development. Here’s to hoping the generated code throughout all this is clean and well structured.

Check out the official site from Adobe: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/

Oh yeah, could they be any more stereotypical with their “designer” and “developer” actors? Could he be any more hunched over and can she be and calmer and collected sipping her coffee in her lovely well lit space?