O’Reilly: Inside RIA

The latest release of Flash Catalyst Beta 2 has brought us a lot closer to having a shipping application. We now have the ability to set a host of properties for each object, easier access to skin the wireframe components, and support for video and 3D rotation. Unfortunately, we do not have a full component set available to us. The reason behind not having all the components in Flash Catalyst is due to the different component architecture used in the Flex 4 framework (Spark) versus the Halo components used in the Flex 3 framework. Until a component has been rewritten in the Spark framework, Flash Catalyst cannot use it. The most notable absence is the comboBox. In this article I will show you a simple method to recreate one by creating a custom component. It is not perfect, but it just might be able to tide you over until we have an official component from Adobe.

With the release of the Flash Catalyst Beta 2, the public gets its next look at Adobe’s rapid prototyping tool. The application has continued to mature since the last release. Here is a brief rundown of some of the features...

Now that the first public beta of Flash Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo) has been released, we can start to explore some of the features that have been added since the Preview release from last November. I will assume you have worked through some of the other introductions to the Flash Catalyst user interface. One of new features that has been implemented in the release is the Data List Component.

Thoughts on the preview release of Flash Catalyst and its role in aiding the designer-developer collaboration.