By: Michael Boucher

One of the big announcements at Adobe MAX this year was the release name of Adobe Thermo, which is now called Adobe Catalyst. Since seeing the many demos of Catalyst on various blogs I've been anticipating its release for a long time. This is a tool that I think has been missing from the designer-to-developer work flow for far too long. It appears Adobe has a pulse on the pain points of designers, as well as developers, in regards to the communication gap between designers and developers. Adobe has listened and Adobe has delivered. Welcome Catalyst, welcome!

One other communication gap I see Thermo bridging is the one between designer/developer and client. Often times a client will get static mocks of an interface design and left to their own devices of trying to envision how the interactions are going to work. Adobe Catalyst will make it very easy to create prototypes rapidly and will allow the client to get into the driver's seat and take the application for a spin. Since Catalyst appears to be very well integrated into the CS4 Suite of design tools, any design changes can very easily be made without breaking the underlying interaction. This was one concern I read about and it seems to be a non-issue from the video demo on Labs. One other concern was the ability to make design changes in Catalyst after the developer started working on it in Flex Builder, that too seems to be a non-issue.

One of the perks this year at MAX is getting your dirty little fingers on a pre-pre-release version of Catalyst. Unfortunately I didn't make it to MAX so I've got to wait for it to appear on Adobe Labs before I get to play with it. My estimate is that it will be up later this week or early next week after MAX has wrapped up.

My mouth is watering. Waiting in bait ...