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About the Author
Andrew Muller
Trainer, mentor, developer, blogger, and presenter, Andrew Muller has
been involved with Rich Internet Applications in Australia since 2002. He's also a certified Adobe instructor for Flex, AIR, ColdFusion, Flash, and Connect, and an Ambassador and Community Expert for Adobe.
Flash Catalyst: Mockup to Masterpiece, Part I
Flash Catalyst, formerly codenamed Thermo, promises to make the process of converting an interface design to code a smooth and easy experience. In this tutorial, spread over two parts, Andrew Muller shows us how to build a nifty Flash application that retrieves music chart data from Yahoo!, using Illustrator, Flash Catalyst, and Flash Builder. Pay attention—there’s a quiz at the end!
Note: To play along at home, you’ll need to grab the following:
- Our sample design, in Illustrator format
- A copy of Illustrator CS4, if you’d like to edit the sample project
- A copy of the Flash Catalyst beta
- A copy of Flex Builder or Flash Builder—grab a demo of Flash Builder here.
The Designer’s Dilemma
Designers have a variety of tools they use on a regular basis to do their day job, often sticking to the one that they know best. Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop are two that dominate the software list of choice for interface designers of all stripes, whether they’re involved with site design, rich internet application (RIA) development, or any other kind of screen-based experience. Then, the design is handed over to a developer to convert into a working interface.
A shortcoming of this design process is that, while it allows the designer to create a look for a web application, it’s impossible to see the feel or interactivity of an application until a developer has implemented it. The translation of that design is often imperfect, with designer and developer sometimes at odds over an object being a pixel out or the wrong color shade. How can we build stronger bridges between the two? Enter Flash Catalyst.
Introducing Adobe Flash Catalyst
Adobe has recently released the first public beta of Flash Catalyst, a new tool to help designers become more involved in the process of building RIA interactions. Designers can use Catalyst to build interactive interfaces for the Flash Player from work they’ve created in either Illustrator or Photoshop, with support for Fireworks slated to follow in a later release. Catalyst is capable of maintaining virtually all the characteristics of the original artwork; users can create interfaces in the applications with which they’re most comfortable, import them to Catalyst for more changes, then complete the round-trip back to the original design tool for further design alterations. Of course, since Catalyst is still in beta, there are some missing options that should come in later beta releases, but it still will give the user a good feel for what’s to come.
As well as converting artwork into a Flash interface, Catalyst includes tools to add interactive elements to the design. This initial release has the ability to convert objects into a limited but useful number of UI components, including data lists, buttons, and scrollbars, with extra UI controls available for wireframing interfaces directly in the Catalyst design view. Catalyst also includes tools for managing state and animated effects. Developers are likely to enjoy Catalyst because the designer can now turn objects into buttons before handing over the design, thus reducing a developer’s workload. It will also mean that there should be less possibility of designs being improperly applied to Flash applications, since all the visuals have been prepared in advance.
Mocking Up the Interface in Illustrator
We’re going to create a simple Flash application that will display information retrieved online via Yahoo’s YQL (Yahoo Query Language) service. For dynamic content we’ll use four YQL queries to retrieve a variety of music chart information. To help make this tutorial easier, we’ve decided to use example queries from the YQL site. Yahoo also provides design stencils that you can use to prototype your next RIA masterpiece; the tab stencils from the Yahoo design kit were part of the inspiration for the design of this application.
To begin, I’ve taken a vertical tab design out of the Yahoo stencil kit and imported that into Illustrator. The next task is to create the outline shape of the application—in this example I’ve used Illustrator’s drawing tools to design a box for that, with two rounded corners and a gradient fill to lift it up a bit. The app we’re building will be retrieving multiple rows of data from the YQL service as XML, so the next job is to define a way to display that repetitive data. Depending on the type of data, the typical interface pattern is to display information in either rows or tiles—here I’ve used rows.
We’ll then need to create artwork to represent a single row of music chart data. The data that we’ll receive could include chart position, a URL for album cover artwork, a chart position shift indicator, and the names of the artist and track. Lastly, there’s a scrollbar, designed to match the curvy corners of the application.
Next, we’ll need to create artwork to represent the detail view state for the application. In Catalyst, we’re able to specify different states using different files or different layers within the file. Catalyst also has a simple timeline, which may be used to control the timing of objects fading in and out as we switch between states.
With that done we’re ready to show the mockups to a client for feedback, finalize the design, and bring it into Catalyst for some interactivity! Here’s the mockup displaying both states of our app.
Next, it’s time to start adding interactivity in Catalyst.