8 Best Features of Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst CS5.5

8 Best Features of Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst CS5.5

Posted 06/01/2011 at 12:00pm | by J.R. Bookwalter

Adobe Flash Professional & Flash Catalyst CS5.5

If there’s one component of Adobe’s Creative Suite more than any other that’s become a vital tool for designers, it’s probably Flash Professional. Despite the controversy surrounding the platform’s use on Apple’s iOS devices, Flash has come a long way from simply being used to create animated banners for websites.

The innocent days of HTML-only web pages are behind us now, with Adobe Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst leading the charge for creating digital content capable of being used on the desktop, smartphones, tablets and even television screens. Thanks to Adobe’s continued efforts, you have more options than ever for creating professional content capable of being used almost anywhere.

Both Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst have gotten a nice infusion of new superpowers with the latest CS5.5 upgrade, but do you know exactly what’s new? Don’t worry, you won’t have to guess -- just browse our gallery below to find out.

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8 Best Features of Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst CS5.5

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Efficient Workflows for Multi-Target Content
Creating multiple FLA files in a single project that target multiple devices? Flash Professional CS5.5 will be your new best friend thanks to its code and asset sharing ability across documents as well as efficiently testing, packaging and deploying content for a wide range of screens and devices.
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Content Scaling When Resizing Stage
Designing content intended for various screen sizes has become something of a requirement now, so it’s nice to see that Flash Professional CS5.5 has met the challenge head-on with the ability to scale content while resizing your stage -- including symbols and motion paths.
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Enhanced Layer Controls
Proving that sometimes it’s the little things that make the difference, Flash Professional CS5.5 also gives you more control over layers, including the ability to copy and paste, even to a different timeline -- or for that matter, another FLA document entirely. Now that’s progress.
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Enhanced Code Snippets Handling
The Code Snippets panel is a designer’s best friend, and nowhere is that more true than in Flash Professional CS5.5, which adds new quick and easy ways for bringing ActionScript 3.0 code to your projects -- including 20 new code snippets and the ability to preview code in a HUD before applying it.
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Catalyst: Full Designer-Developer Workflow
Designers may spend all of their time in Flash Catalyst, while developers do the same with Flash Builder. With CS5.5, Adobe has implemented a smoother workflow between the two applications, building on the ability in CS5 for designers to pass FXP Flex Project files to developers. Flash Catalyst CS5.5 even helps prevent deleting or modifying components as they’re moved back and forth.
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Resizeable Applications and Components
Flash Catalyst CS5.5 also makes short work of creating applications that look great across devices with different screen sizes, a huge design challenge in the past. Set up a project to be resizable with an option in the New Project or Artboard Settings dialog box and you can track changes in the size of your components, even across different states.
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Common Library Panel
The Wireframe Components panel in CS5 is history, replaced with a new Common Library panel in Flash Catalyst CS5.5. The new horizontal library panel sports larger and more descriptive icons, separated into two distinct categories for Flex Spark components or placeholder components.
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User-Requested Enhancements
Last but not least, Adobe has introduced a variety of user-requested enhancements to Flash Catalyst CS5.5, including the new Align panel shown above. You’ll now enjoy more efficient component naming as well as a new “Replace With” command as well as an updated color theme to quickly generate wireframes with a consistent look.