Geez guys. Why is everyone against design views? I'm all for Flash Catalyst. I'm all for what it was trying to solve. I agree, it wasn't complete but neither is Flash Builder or the Spark Flex SDK.
I don't know about you but I'm tired of writing out Path data="M 0 0 L 0 16 L 16 8 L 0 0 Z" to create a simple triangle. You shouldn't have to do that. In Ps and Ai what you see is what you get. It's setup so you can change a property or effect and see the change instantly. It's fast. How much time do you waste by the change property, style or effect, compile (+/- 15s), preview in browser, rinse, repeat process? It's sooooo agonizingly slow. I mean I think most of us come from a design background and designer tools??? Fc had a timeline and effects preview. It let you see the different states and skins. It created the FXG and MXML and import and export of Ps and Ai art. I don't like having to create 5 skins to change the look of a scroll bar button. With Flash Catalyst I didn't have to worry about that. I think that's been an advantage of Flex and Flash over HTML / JS is that there is a design / debugging tool with declarative markup or the promise of one (or there was). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-brqopywIB0&feature=youtube_gdata> In time I think it would have been a kick ass tool. I'm glad they kept a design builder tool in mind for Spark. I know a lot of coders that get so comfortable in coding and doing everything in code including design elements that they forget the benefits of a design tool and design first approach. On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Doug McCune <d...@dougmccune.com> wrote: > The saddest thing to me is how much time and effort went into building an > entirely new (yet still incomplete) component model (Spark) that was built > all around the idea of Catalyst. That's not to say that the Spark > architecture doesn't have good ideas when you remove Catalyst from the > picture, but the amount of time that went into designing it to work with > the Fc tooling was all for naught. I have to believe many decisions would > have been made differently, and a lot of time would have been invested > differently had the Catalyst tooling support not been the priority. > > Personally I'm happy to see Catalyst go, and would have been happier to see > it go long ago. >
