Adobe Flash Builder and Catalyst

Adobe has announced the beta availability of Adobe Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder), Adobe Flash Catalyst and the open source Flex 4 framework, all now available from the Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. site.

The most anticipated of course is the brand-new app, Flash Catalyst, previously codenamed "Thermo".

Although Flash technology has long been around, the applications never did it full justice, and this had been a huge disappointment to Adobe which has been constantly pushing the benefits of Flash as a RIA platform.

In attempt to rectify this, Adobe developed an IDE to woo developers, which came in the form of Flex Builder. However, this move cut the designers out of the loop almost entirely, showing a stark divide.

Now, Catalyst is designed to act as a bridge letting designers produce the interface visually (starting with Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks) and then pass on the resulting Flex markup to the developer.

The above approach however does betray the similarities in Adobe's Flash/Flex/MXML to Microsoft's Expression/Silverlight/XAML.

The news, although promising was offset by the announcement of a 10% price hike by Adobe on CS4 suites and apps, effective July 1st. The rise was attributed to currency fluctuations between the value of the pound versus the dollar.