Flash Catalyst aims towards allowing for importing a ready-made Photoshop file with a site design to a workbench, where various functionality can be added easily: new pages, visual effects (transitions) etc. It all sounds really nice, as it makes it easy to convert a design into a real application with functionality.

It’s giving me the creeps

It’s pretty much at this moment I really start getting the creeps. To me, WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editors have never been anything but bad. They’re of course easy-to-use, but generally produce crappy code that infects your application like a virus. The code debt increases exponentially by the minute (OK, maybe I’m exaggerating again…)  and in the end, you’ll lose control of your application.

This might be OK in one-time-development applications such as ads, campaign sites etc, but in our world, we can’t really afford creating our applications from scratch all the time. It’s really important to create good, reusable code in order to stay on top. And from what I’ve seen this far, that is nothing that’s done by using tools like Flash Catalyst (or even Flex?).

It’s important to stay in control

We mostly build large applications with quite advanced features and we need to be able to maintain in control of the code, as the risk of producing nasty bugs increases with the size of your application. If you’re using a UI based tool like Flash Catalyst, it’s very likely that you will have a lot more trouble finding where the issue really is than if you’ve got yourself a well-written code base.

In my opinion – when working with applications like ours’ – the development velocity is not more important than having a well-developed application.

I’m not saying it’s worthless…

As with everything, I can’t really say that it’s crap before we’ve tried it out for real. I just don’t think we’ll be able to rely on it for our bigger games, given what I’ve read and the demos I’ve watched this far. But maybe we can use Flash Catalyst for marketing campaigns (i.e. ads) and smaller prototypes of our applications? That would probably be a more logical way to use it.

Please prove me wrong; it’d be awesome if designers could implement their changes while not ruining my code…

Some references

Chris Griffith’s thoughts on FC (and some comments on his thoughts)

FC Video Tutorial

Official FC site