Flash tools hit beta

The next iteration of Adobe's Flash tools have reached beta status and provide some concrete evidence of what Adobe was going on about with its prognostications of Thermo and changing workflow over the past year.

The problem with Flash Catalyst, the product formerly known as Thermo, was that thousands of words were not able to convey the interface, interaction or behaviour of an application in the way that four minutes of video can.

Now all those things Adobe previously said start to make a little more sense. There will no doubt be the argument that some developers like to do UIs their way and will hate the code generated out of Catalyst, but at a bare minimum I think any program that delivers some tangible code is far ahead of any mock-up that said developer would have received in the past — code is malleable, PSDs less so.

Adobe's Flex 4 framework, Flash Catalyst 4 and Flash Builder 4, previously known as Flex Builder, can be downloaded here.