I was as giddy as a schoolgirl for Catalyst. But as of this Beta, it doesn't open Fireworks CS4 files natively! Only Illustrator and Photoshop files. I would have thought that Fireworks, a tool positioned for prototyping (and even with some teasers of Flex integration, and mapped to Catalyst's concept of States!) would have a stronger relationship with a tool dedicated to taking prototypes to the next step. Actually, I always wondered why Catalyst wasn't conceived as a feature of Fireworks, since FW already supports importing Illustrator and Photoshop files. But that's a discussion for another day.
For now, Catalyst seems only to open Fireworks PNGs as flattened files (you'll only see the first page of a Fireworks CS4 file). You can do a one-way export into the new FXG format from Fireworks CS4, but it doesn't look like you can round-trip between Catalyst and Fireworks, which was what made these two products powerful, in my mind. You can import assets from Fireworks individually and edit them in place (well, if you go through Illustrator...), but this wastes a lot of time if you've already laid out a full design in Fireworks and want to continue cranking out mockups as the product evolves. And as we all know, the design WILL change as soon as you play with it as an interactive prototype. I wonder why this fundamental insight wasn't baked in from the beginning. To be clear, I want to be as constructive and snark-free as possible with this post-- Adobe sponsored the Interaction conference this year, and they even made a good-faith effort to set up a Catalyst demo there as a free workshop. It didn't work out in the end due to an illness, but many of took home pre-release versions of Catalyst! If any of you Adobe folks are following this discussion, I would be curious to know if native round-tripping with Fireworks is planned for Catalyst. Not sure why you wouldn't do this, as Fireworks's layout (and philosophy) has such a natural mapping to Catalyst's world. - Nasir ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
