When our development team came back from Adobe Max last year with tales of a design/dev hybrid tool called Flash Catalyst, my interest was peaked to say the least. Flash Catalyst seemed like the holy grail of interactive apps, promising a streamlined Photoshop/Illustrator to Flash/Air experience that empowered designers and made developers’ lives easier. After a week of total Catalyst immersion, however, I have a few bones to pick with Adobe.

Like any good first draft, Catalyst has some successful components and the core concept is undoubtedly an exciting one. However, for a program targeting designers, its user experience leaves a lot to be desired.

Clunky UI: Catalyst’s interface lacks the finesse of Photoshop or Illustrator on both a large and small scale. The workspace is crowded and offers paltry customization options. Photoshop and Illustrator take into account that designers need to tailor workspaces to specific projects and moods and provide the tools to do that. Catalyst’s workspace lacks hierarchy and sticks to a claustrophobic grid. On a smaller scale, Catalyst’s versions of key tools like the gradient slider are crude and disappointing knock-offs of those offered in their sister programs.

No Collaboration: For a program meant to foster increased communication between design and development, one would think there would be a Dreamweaver-esque split panel view for code view vs. design view. Instead, users are forced to toggle between a code-only or design-only view. Allowing designers to understand which pieces of code correspond to design elements is crucial; empowering designers means not only allowing them to maximize the power of their native skill set, but also giving them the perspective to see how their designs translate into development.

Limited Scalability: Between Catalyst’s “only one file open at a time” rule and its inability to support larger files with many components, I’m left feeling more limited than freed.

Gaunt Resources: Catalyst could really benefit from better resources, both internally and externally. The program’s wireframe library is helpful but needs to be bigger and smarter. I’d love to see some Flex Explorer-esque functionality to enable quick creation of more complex custom components. Externally, Catalyst’s featured Lynda.com tutorials are great but relatively basic. Existing how-to’s can teach me how to create a file or make a button, but offer no advice on how to create a more complex tiered drop down menu.

All things considered, the Catalyst team has quite a bit of work ahead of them to make this program successful. While the program hasn’t been refined enough yet to make good on its promises to designers, it does seem to be a helpful tool for developers to quickly develop component skins for user in Flex Projects.