so i think the short/medium term it may not be readily useful to others until they improve some the issues mentioned.

as a one-man-shop i am personally very excited about it - but then again that doesn’t mean i’m going to purchase a license and use it. but if it’s priced right (as-is flex builder) i suspect it will be a no-brainer. my understanding is that adobe make no money of flex builder, not sure what their plans are with catalyst. i suspect that they do want to make money with it (as they do with the flash IDE) so the pricing will not be low like flex builder.

As the developer community is very familiar with the fairly polished Creative Suites, this means any new product will be compared to them. This is definitely where my comments spawn from, and because you’re in the Adobe stable it seemed rather odd that these things weren’t addressed in the Alpha stage.

I also wanted to add that upon further reflection I can see that the majority of drawing and editing of assets will actually be done in either Photoshop or Illustrator; so my negativity about some of the control issues may be a moot point in the long run. Will be interesting to see who uses the program when it’s released.

As an engineer on the Catalyst team, I wanted to add my perspective to just a few of your points:

@Performance: We’ll be spending a good deal more time on this before we ship the final release.

@HUD: We know people don’t like it (we’ve been getting this feedback for a while), and we’re working on improving it (hopefully getting rid of it altogether).

@Pan tool, keyboard shortcuts, alignment: These are all artifacts of this being our first beta release. We’re working on a pan tool now, and are continuously improving the keyboard shortcuts. Take a step back and look at the other CS apps - there’s a lot there! It’s going to take us some time to achieve parity with the common tools.

All I’m really saying is - if these issues are pissing you off now, try again in the next beta. You may find many of them improved.

-Adam
Flash Catalyst Team

HOWEVER… I am completely with you on the usability issue. For the last couple of days I’ve been playing around with Flash Catalyst and don’t find it intuitive, friendly or quick to use. One of Adobe’s stated goals was that it would be familiar to users of other Adobe CS4 products. In that respect, it fails miserably. It has nothing in common with other Adobe CS4 products, for some of the reasons you’ve stated and for other reasons too.

I utterly DESPISE the HUD. Someone has obviously decided that it would look cool to borrow it from Lightroom and just stuck it there in the middle of nowhere, in the way, like a great big lemon. Get rid of it Adobe. (For what it’s worth, I don’t like Lightroom anyway, specifically because the interface is so bad, cramped and hurts the eyes. I used to use it but switched to Aperture as soon as 1.5 was released and have never looked back).

What this product does is amazing. From me, it gets a 10/10. How it does it is really bad and I agree with you that this does not appear to be because it is a beta, but rather that usability has been ignored. I find it easier and less irritating to just write the fsg by hand.

I think the other issue is that the timeline of the Creative Suite products is different from the Flex products, something I imagine that Adobe would not want to change to give the Flex team more flexibility in when their product came out.

It fragments the Flash tooling, but I think a tool like Catalyst was really needed in order to skin Flex applications easier.