Adobe Aligns Software Branding to Shine Light on Flash

IDG News Service — Adobe is aligning its Web design and developer tools, including a new one available for testing Monday, under its Flash brand to emphasize the heart of its strategy to give developers everything they need to build RIAs.

Adobe FlexBuilder is being rebranded as Adobe FlashBuilder to alleviate some confusion developers had about the software and to emphasize the importance of the Flash brand and technology, said Adobe group marketing manager David Gruber during a recent meeting in New York. FlashBuilder is a tool that allows developers to work with design code

"There's been some confusion in the marketplace about the Flex brand," he said.

This confusion stems from the existence of another offering, the Flex framework, which is free software for building applications for either the Flash player running in a browser or the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) running on a desktop, Gruber said. FlexBuilder, on the other hand, is a commercially sold toolset for building RIAs using Flash and other technologies.

"We're up-leveling the Flash brand and ... trying to get this out in front of people early so people can see what we’re doing," Gruber said.

On Monday, Adobe will release betas of version 4 of both of those products, as well as the beta for another Flash-centric tool, Adobe Flash Catalyst. Catalyst is a new tool that helps bridge the gap between designers and developers so a rich Internet application as conceived by a designer has the best chance of being developed that way on the back end, Gruber said.

Catalyst previously went by the code name Thermo, but was named in November at Adobe's developer conference.

Usually, a design team will conceive how it wants an application to look and come up with a set of what are called "wire frames" -- similar to still photographs -- to show developers how the application should look, he said. The team will also pass over a set of assets -- such as photographs, graphics and the like -- to developers to incorporate into the final application.

Because these are static images and assets for what will eventually be a dynamic and creative application, this process is flawed; it's hard for developers to create exactly what the designer had in mind by building an application this way, said Tim Buntel, a senior product manager at Adobe.

"A developer doesn’t find it easy to translate those suggestions to allow a functioning application," he said.

Catalyst solves this problem by allowing "the designer who came up with the design in the first place to come up with a working application without having to write all that code," Buntel said.

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