A nice video on wireframing with Adobe Catalyst (previously called Thermo) just appeared and has some good insights into the upcoming application. Peter Flynn spends a full hour showing some of the things which are possible. Here is my take on it.
Some negative remarks:
- Page scaling? What happens when you have 30 pages? The top bar seems a bit limited in displaying the pages in a horizontal scroll area. Each page takes up quite a bit of space.
- The transitions between design and preview mode still feels very clunky just as in Flash, with the whole compilation procedure.
- Event handling is a bit limited. At least three event handlers are visible: onclick, onrollover, and onrollout. What about onkeypress, onrightclick, on ondrag? AJAX and rich interactions have more power than what can be seen in this application.
- Where are event conditions? As an example, nowadays interaction designers sometimes specify a 1-2 second delay onmouseout before menu is hidden, which can increase usability (protect an item from disappearing accidentaly). At least from the video I have not seen this visible.
- The program is a bit ambitious in claiming to deliver eventual production ready code.
- The interaction between Flash Catalyst with the importing and exporting seems a bit tricky.
Nice things:
- Thorough effect / transition order control. It is possible to control the duration and order of effects or transitions between states on a mini time line, as well as stack multiple transitions together.
- Shared objects are possible. Edit once, update everywhere.
- Independent states. Users can define multiple states for each object which are independent across objects. (just like in fluidIA) :)
