Flash® Catalyst™ CS5 Bible

Introduction

Creating beautiful graphic designs and user interfaces is an obviously creative pursuit that combines a large degree of both natural talent and learned skills. Writing code, however, is every bit as creative a process as design. There is no one right way to write code.

Design and coding, however, require quite different skillsets and talents, and while there are some whose talent at design matches their talent at code, most find they excel at one or the other.

Flash Catalyst CS5 seeks to bridge the gap between the two, providing a means by which designers can utilize their skills in Illustrator and Photoshop to create rich designs, but avoid having to get deeply into what they likely consider the fairly intimidating world of writing code. Catalyst also provides a means by which coders who may not be great at design — who likely consider Illustrator to be every bit as intimidating as their design counterparts think of Flash Builder — can take the designs created by others and implement them in their projects.

Flash Catalyst CS5 is the first version of this product. Many, if not most, people today are used to working in programs that have been around for years, if not decades. They are used to finding a lot of people who have a deep understanding of the program and what it can do, and used to finding many resources available for it. As the new kid in the Adobe product line, Catalyst does not yet have that user base or the number of resources available as of yet.

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