Fireworks vs Catalyst

I'm trying to understand the difference between these two apps.
I am pretty much a complete web app noob. I did use GL a bit years ago, and use Rapidweaver now and then. Pretty much 100% of my design work is print. I have been getting more requests to do web work. I am in that situation that I'm sure is familiar to many print designers - I want to do more web work but the learning curve of some of the web apps seems very daunting.
I finally got around to trying Catalyst. I have to say, so far, I've really been enjoying it. I like that I can build prototypes in Illy and PS and import, and it doesn't seem so deep technically to be intimidating.
In further research I started checking into Fireworks. I've seen it around, but never really looked at it. On the surface both Fireworks and Catalyst look similar (prototyping apps).
It looks like Fireworks can export to an HTML and AIR platform and Catalyst exports to AIR only. Is this correct? Fireworks files can also be brought into DW for further work.
A few of my clients have expressed a concern with producing Flash based sites. I don't know how much of an issue this is anymore. And I believe the search engines are getting better at indexing text within Flash sites.
I did look at SiteGrinder, but was not impressed with the interface.
TIA

Flash Catalyst is an interactive protoyping tool, which can create features such as an interactive gallery or even a Flash-based web site, I suppose. It's primary goal was to bridge the gap between designers and developers; Designers could mock up an interactive protoype, complete with animation and transitions, with no coding experience at all. This prototype could then be handed off to a developer to "wire up" and make truly functional in Flash Builder.
Fireworks is a screen graphics design application, with basic interactive features built into it. It's used to wireframe, prototype and (in some cases) export a functional web page, but it's also a creative tool with a pretty solid collection of both bitmap and vector tools. Flash Catalyst, on the other hand, has basic drawing tools and relies on programs like Fireworks, Photoshop or Illustrator to supply rich graphics. Unlike FC, FW cannot create animated transitions. Its interactiviyt is limited to HTML/JavaScript interactivity such as rollovers and hyperlinks. For web graphics, its export engine is hard to beat, producing web images that are typically 20 - 30% smaller in file size than Photoshop.
There's not really a FW vs FC situation. The programs complement each other rather than compete, IMO. Sadly, the biggest stumbling blcok at this point is the lack of a round-trip workflow between FW and FC.
HTH.

Similar Messages

Should I learn Fireworks or Builder to Design Flex Apps?

I need help in making a process decision on how to build Flex
Apps going forward.
In the past, we have built the concept for our Flex app in
Photoshop and sent it over to our development team in India to
build. The process has been difficult because our engineers are not
designers and our designers are not engineers. Invariably we spend
alot of time bridging the gap between whats possible and what we
want to see in our Apps.
I want to bring our Design and Dev much closer together and
essentially take the GUI out of the hands of my Indian Developers
and let them focus on the backend.
To accomplish this goal, I will be training my US Design team
to become either Fireworks Experts or Flex Builder Experts....
(they are already Photoshop experts) This is where I need your
help. If you were starting from scratch with a talented design team
that could learn either tool, which one would you choose to
accomplish the goal? Does the Fireworks to Flex export create
crappy code like Dreamweaver thats tough to modify manually? Does a
"true" Flex developer despise Fireworks-generated code?
I have read up on the Fireworks>Flash Catalyst>Flex
Builder Path and dont understand the additional step... is Catalyst
part of Fireworks and thats how Flex code is developed or is it a
new code generation engine that does code better than Fireworks
CS4?
Thanks in advance.

I am understanding my question better now... Please read
below
I am attempting to remove inefficiencies in my Flex
development process by re-tooling my design team so that their UI
and application design output files can be imported directly into
the developers environment. Essentially, I want designers to
produce prototypes with working client-side interactions while the
developers focus on back-end interactions.
Our current process has a number of throwaways that occur
during the web application build process: from wireframe, to
Photoshop, to development using the Photoshop output as a guide for
development... this last step is often the most mangled because is
difficult to implement the design exactly as the designer created
it in Photoshop because designers do not fully understand what is
possible. I want to remove the steps in-between and have found two
possible solutions to do this.
Option 1) Fireworks CS4>Catalyst(Thermo)>Flex4
SDK>*.SWF
Option 2) Fireworks>Flex3 SDK>*.SWF
With Option 1, we would tool up our Designers on Fireworks
and Catalyst and get our developers on the Flex4 SDK. The output of
the design/build would be only compatible with Flash10 and the
stock component library for Flex4 would be limited.
With Option 2, we would tool up our Designers on Fireworks
and use the native Fireworks export to Flex 3 (not sure how well
this works?). The output would be compatible with Flash 9 and the
stock and aftermarket component library for Flex3 would be rich.
Do I have this right? Which option would you choose and why?
Thanks in advance.

After Flash Catalyst discontinued - What Workflow Designer / Developper to use? and how skin compone

Hi,
Now that Flash Catalyst is discontinued before being totally usable,
I used Flash Catalyst for skinning components and prototyping design of App.
So i wonder how experienced people do that without Flash Catalyst?
And more im asking to Adobe the same questions. What do you propose to do now what Flash catalyst helped to do until now?
how do you skin components?
how do you work with designers to get their App Pages designs?
in a word, what is the WorkFlow?
Thanks

I couldn't agree more with you that developers need a solid WYSIWYG tool, and Catalyst was Adobe's closest rival to Blend. It had much more potential than the amount of attention it received. Adobe was very foolish pulling the plug on it, not to mention all their other recent decisions related to the Flash Platform.
My point was that with all of the importing and exporting capabilities of Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash Professional, and especially Fireworks, you already have all of the capabilities of Flash Catalyst, at least in regards to making creative assets available to the Flex framework. That was the sole purpose of Catalyst- to bridge the gap between Adobe's design applications and Flex. If you weren't concerned with Flex, Flash Catalyst would be of no use, even if it were still in development. Exporting a Catalyst project to Flash Professional or HTML was never on it's roadmap, although I'm sure I'm not the first person who thought of those possibilities.
Catalyst, simply put, was the FXG editor which Flash Builder's design mode was not. For example, you could not draw a rectangle using Builder's design mode. With Catalyst CS5.5, it allowed you to directly assign FXG assets to MXML skins for ten of the nineteen Spark components which use the MXML skin architecture. This was a huge limitition, and espeically obvious with the new roundtripping feature, because using any of the non-supported components could easily break the connection between Builder & Catalyst. Honestly, myself and many of the Adobe engineers I talked to on the Flash Builder team, still do not understand why Catalyst wasn't merged into Flash Builder in the first place.
Perhaps it's not as useful out of context, but I compiled a presentation a few months ago for my Adobe user group, titled "Creative & Production Harmony": https://acrobat.com/#d=jNyu*qRjpF68tbl*8lCiTw&x=s
Basically what it outlined, was when to use Catalyst, and when you are better off exporting straight from the other design apps. My conclusion, was that you're generally better off designing your assets in the app you're comfortable with. That IS your WYSIWYG editor, to the precision of 1px. It was also a future proof answer since Catalyst was discontinued and many of the other Flex related workflows have evaporated. The main loss behind discontinuing Catalyst, were its states, timeline, and visual editing of FXG less commonly preserved when exporting from the other apps.
A workflow example for a project I recently used Catalyst with, http://disneycruiseadventure.com/ was to open the PSD provided inside of Photoshop, launch Catalyst, draw a shape (or copy/paste in a vector smart object from Illustrator), and use it's properties panel to match the Photoshop layer styles. This basically the climax of the day, because the rest of it was all spent manually editing code in Builder (and often fixing a lot of the crap code Catalyst spit out). For advanced use of graphics, we relied heavily on the Flex Component Kit, which basically lets you work with any MovieClip inside of Flex or even insert Flex components into a Flash Professional container. The integration between Flex & Flash Pro is most commonly overlooked, which is sad because it still offers the very most design freedom for Flex and has been around long before Catalyst.
In my personal project, my workflow heavily involves Fireworks. It's exporting capabilities are unparralled by any of the other Adobe design apps. You can design with the 1px precision you are after, and almost always preserve that precision after exporting to Flex 3, FXG, and even CSS. Speaking of CSS, now you can export to CSS3 and jQuery mobile themes using Fireworks. If I had a choice between Fireworks and Catalyst, I would take Fireworks without any question. If you're looking for another workflow, consider the idea of taking HTML/CSS exported by Fireworks and opening it inside of Adobe Edge for adding animation and interactivity. Then do your final editing with Dreamweaver, or skip the Edge step if you don't need it.

What new can we expect in Adobe Fireworks CS5?

Recently i came across this post somewhere http://keithics.com/blog/article/adobe-fireworks-cs5-preview/224/
so i want to ask the fireworks development team if this is really going to happen someday..Should we expect next version of the fireworks to contain all the photoshop filters and fully functional Layer styles like gradient overlay color change etc..This is such a surprise that fireworks names them as Photoshop live effects yet some of the features are not fully supported like in photoshop..One more thing where fireworks is lagging behind photoshop is its use of brushes..Is it possible that fireworks start integrating .abr brushes of Photoshop in its newer versions?IF all this happens i am dead sure people will quit using photoshop and acquire adobe fireworks as their primary web designing tool...Comments of Jim Babbagi in particular regarding this post of mine will be badly awaited...

>>Some things I'd like to see Adobe owrk on follow. For example, I like the Master pages feature but I'd like multiple masters because I have common items across many pages but not all. As a partial solution, I find that I can use the Share Layers to Pages feature to good effect but this doesn't work with the Web Layer. This means that if I want to add hotspots or slices to a non-mastered Page then I have to duplicate it on all the other non-mastered pages which can create a lot of duplication.<<
While you can't share the main web layer across pages, you can create a web sub layer and the sublayer can be shared ion much the same manner as regular layers.
>>I've used both Flash and Fireworks to do prototyping. I find FireWorks a lot faster but it's lacking in things like transitions. I would like to add simple image swaps with a fade transition. A friend recently showed me how this can be done in Adobe Catalyst and that was nice to see how fast and easy it is to use. Sort of takes the nice things from Flash and makes it much simpler to do user interface design. Sadly, that is what FireWorks is supposed to do. I'm surprised that Adobe made Catalyst instead of adding those kinds of things to FireWorks but maybe it's too far to reach.<<
I can understand your frustration, but FW is a graphics app first and foremost. It's got the design tools that FC doesn't have. It was never planned to be a completely interactive tool. At least we can export Fireworks objects and designs as FXG, so we can wire up that interactivity within Flash Catalyst.
>>So, I may switch to Catalyst for prototyping.<<
Flash Catalyst doesn't have the graphics chops of software like Fireworks, Photoshop or Illustrator though. It's a tool for creating the interactivity more than it is a graphics tool. I see a fit for both.
>>To bring FireWorks along to that level of easy and power for prototyping, it's a matter of taking Fireworks a little further down the road with usability improvements and expert user types of improvements.<<
I'm sure there will be improvements, but I wouldn't expect Fireworks to become an interactive tool like FC.
>>BTW, it's sad to see that I can't yet directly integrate FireWorks to Catalyst. It allows importing PhotoShop and Illustrator.<<
Yeah, don't get me started on THAT one. You aren't the only one disappointed about this, but who knows what cool things the future may bring.
>>I guess FireWorks is the red headed step child.<<
I like red hair. Seriously, Fireworks is a tool that many people have a hard time understanding - if they've never used it before. I've heard it called Photoshop's poor cousin, or an ImageReady replacement. From my perspective, it just does so many diffferent things that people have a hard time labeling it. Macromedia never got it right - and they created the software! They spent way too much time comparing it to Photoshop. And it's not Photoshop. At least Adobe has found a useful niche for my favorite graphics app, so I will give them that much. HTH!

Design Flex with Fireworks CS4 or Flex Builder?

I need help in making a process decision on how to build Flex
Apps going forward.
In the past, we have built the concept for our Flex app in
Photoshop and sent it over to our development team in India to
build. The process has been difficult because our engineers are not
designers and our designers are not engineers. Invariably we spend
alot of time bridging the gap between whats possible and what we
want to see in our Apps.
I want to bring our Design and Dev much closer together and
essentially take the GUI out of the hands of my Indian Developers
who choose to work in raw XML rather than Builder today.
To accomplish this goal, I will be training my US Design team
to become either Fireworks Experts or Flex Builder Experts....
(they are already Photoshop experts) This is where I need your
help. If you were starting from scratch with a talented design team
that could learn either tool, which one would you choose to
accomplish the goal? Does the Fireworks to Flex export create
crappy code like Dreamweaver thats tough to modify manually? Does a
"true" Flex developer despise Fireworks-generated code?
I have read up on the Fireworks>Flash Catalyst>Flex
Builder Path and dont understand the additional step... is Catalyst
part of Fireworks and thats how Flex code is developed or is it a
new code generation engine that does code better than Fireworks
CS4?
Thanks in advance.

Here's my recommendation:
I would suggest Fireworks for your Design team/ Flexbuilder
for your dev team.
Essentially, what Fireworks already has in terms of Flex UI
components (though a short list) is identical in theme (default
halo) AND output (mxml code) as you would expect from creating in
Flexbuilder alone.
You can then easily extend your designs with custom
components using the Fw Commands Export Flex Skins and they can be
imported to your Flex project using the CSS Designer.
As for Catalyst, this is a separate beast altogether. It's
merely meant to bridge designs (from design applications Ps, Ill,
Fw) and create usable components for complete animations.
A full tutorial/ video overview was just released a few days
ago here
http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/2009/01/getting-started-with-flash-catalyst-tutorial/
As for how Fw fits into the Catalyst scheme of things,
designs you create can be exported to the FXG format that Catalyst
will use, if you want to use Flex and work with this format you
have to have the latest Flex SDK plugged into FlexBuilder 3 or Flex
4 will have full support for it.
Here is an older referebce to this scenerio (reference to
Thermo = Flash Catalyst and Gumbo = Flex 4)
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/08/28/getting-started-with-flex-4-fxg-and-flex-build er-3/
Hope this helps.
h

How to connect my app interface with the code in flash builder?

I'm a beginner and learning my way around actionscript,mxml and flash builder.So this may seem foolish but please bear with me,I'm creating a very simple ios app using flash builder,I have created a simple app interface (A background and a custom navigation bar)using photoshop for my app,now the question is how do i import it into flash builder so that i can connect it with the code i have written? or is there another simpler way to create a app interface using other products like fireworks or catalyst?
In short, I want to know how is an app interface created(wt software) and how is it connected with its code using flash builder.Any help would be greatly appreciated, and tutorials would be swell
Thanks!

Can you use stage.width or stage.stageWidth?

Looking for some advice on what to do now.

I've spent every free moment working between flash, fireworks and illustrator for awhile now. I've spent every evening after work working with lynda.com tutorials. It's been great. My goal was to learn all the basics of web site design. I even created a full thirty plus page layout in fireworks. The problem is i feel stuck now. I don't see the apps playing nice with each other. At least when it comes to exporting out the full site designs from one application to the other. I took an fxp file for example and brought it over from fireworks to catalyst. It looked all kinds of messed up. The move from fireworks to flash was less messed up but still unmanigable. Complete sections where screwed up. So I'm wondering what proccess to use to move from one app to the other. Basicly to get all the elements you need while not fubaring the layout. Should I just do small things then export them to one of the apps. I have no real idea on direction. My goal is to take the website i've been developing in fireworks and add some small flash content between catalyst and regular flash. I want to do all this while trying not to destroy what I spent months building in fireworks. Any help woul be apriciated.

Hi Linda and thank you for your responce. I used DW version four to create my first site a ways back. It was so confusing and difficult to use. I was trying to avoid using it again it for the most part. I new there was going to be minor stuff I would have to use it for. But you say if you learn DW then everything coming together would work better. I had allot of issues with css coding also. I know basic stuff but to really learn DW it's seems to be very coding entensive. It made me actually step way for awhile. I decided to come back to try the more design esq type of apps for web site building. I didnt realize they all seem to come back to DW in the end. I've invested to much time to not keep going. So it looks like I have allot of frustrating DW nights ahead of me.

Workflow zwischen den Programmen!

Hallo an alle.
Hab zwar ein wenig rungeschaut, haber aber nichts befriedigendes für mein Problem finden können, oder bin zu blind
Ich beschäftige mich seit einiger Zeit mit der Creative Suite fürs Webdesign.
Dank Video2Brain ist es ja ganz nett. Doch nachdem ich unmengen an Videos über Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash und Flash Catalyst angeschaut habe, bin ich nun verwirrt und mir sind ehrlich gesagt die Hände gebunden.
Ich habe schon meine Homepage skizziert und nun muss ich sie nur noch erstellen.
Meine Frage an euch:
Wie fange ich am besten an? Fürs Layout hatte ich zuerst an Photoshop und Illustrator gedacht. Doch dann hab ich Fireworks kennengelernt.
Nachdem ich mir dann Flash Catalyst angeschaut habe, hab ich mich gefragt, ob ich nicht alles in Flash Catalyst machen kann und Dreamweaver dann gar nicht mehr brauch.
Also konkret: wie sollte ich meine Arbeitsschritte koordinieren, um nicht am Ende mehr arbeit zu haben, als sowieso schon nötig?
Mit welchem Programm fang ich an und welche Programme sollten dann nacheinander folgen?
Bsp: Photoshop & Illustrator --> Fireworks --> Dreamweaver
Photoshop & Illustrator --> Flash Catalyst --> Dreamweaver
Fireworks --> Flash Catalyst --> Dreamweaver
usw...
Ihr seht ich bin seeeeehhr verwirrt
Ich hoffe, ihr könnt mir nützliche Tipps geben, damit ich endlich den Durchblick habe.
Danke im Voraus.

Na sorry, aber mal Klartext: Dein Problem sind nicht die Programme, du hast einfach irgendwie völlig falsche Prioritäten, weil du dem Irrglauben unterliegst, dass Webdesign irgendwas mit WYSIWYG zu tun hätte und dir die Programme das bieten könnten. Von daher ist es, egal mit welchem Programm du anfängst, völlig unerheblich, ob du nun linksrum mit PS & AI oder rechtsrum mit FW anfängst. In jedem Fall wirst du unnütz Zeit damit verbringen, verkorksten Code und "schlechte" Formatierungen aus Programm A für Programm B aufzubereiten um ihn dann in Programm C (also DW) vielleicht irgendwann mal ins Netz zu stellen. 10000% sinnfrei, ehrlich gesagt. Auch wenn dir das zu mühselig erscheinen mag, du wirst nicht umhin kommen, dich generell erstmal mit HTML und CSS zu beschäftigen und dann anhand dieses Wissens überhaupt erstmal damit anzufangen, in DW mit DIVs, Tabellen usw. ein "sauberes", standardkonformes Seitenlayout zu erstellen. Funktion kommt immer zuerst, alles andere kommt danach und Hintergrundbilder, Buttons usw. kann man, wenn man einmal weiss, wie's geht, so oder so jederzeit einfügen. Da muss man sich nicht erst den Tag mit Photoshop's gräßlichem Uralt-HTML versauen oder in FC irgendwas als Flash-Datei konstruieren, wass sich dann gar nicht als normale Website umsetzen läßt bzw. wo dann ein Klumpen Flash rauskommt, mit dem keine Suchmaschine was anfangen kann. Irgendwie willste ja auch, dass sich deine Seite jemand anguggt, oder? Also einfach nochmal zurücklehnen und auf die richtigen Dinge konzentrieren, nicht einfach blind irgendwelches Marketinggeblubber schlucken. Klar sind die Tools besser geworden, aber Webdesign ist immer noch massiv Krümelkackerei mit Handstrickeinlage...
Mylenium

Did Adobe drop Fireworks support from Flash Catalyst Beta?

Hi all,
I'm a UI designer and am naturally very excited about Thermo / Flast Catalyst. I just rushed to download the beta but was dismayed to see that Flash Catalyst does not properly import Fireworks (CS4) files -- i.e. they were imported as a giant image instead of pages/layers/objects. Was this functionality dropped in just the beta, or is this something that product will lose in production too.
Fireworks has always felt forgotten by the Adobe team (buggy, buggy, buggy) -- I hope this isn't another instance of that happening.

If Adobe finally decides to use part of Fireworks's ".PNG" engine, they shouldn't have to introduce .FXG into the Fireworks product line, since the onus is on Flash Catalyst to port Fireworks, not the other way around.
Using the Fireworks engine, features such as "Pages", or perhaps even Fireworks's "States", would allow for more seamless “.PNG” porting into Catalyst. Also, doing so, would eliminate all those steps one has to take to merely generate states within Catalyst—saving UI designers time by giving them the option to simply make adjustments to the Catalyst timeline. Not only is this faster, but it makes more logical sense!
Ahh...I am beginning to think Adobe’s in over their heads with this one.

Business Catalyst Pricing

Hi Adobe .. First, let me say that I L-O-V-E Business Catalyst and Muse. As a 21-year graphic design professional that was forced into learning code (yuk), Muse has set my creativity free and I now absolutely love designing web sites. I have a Creative Cloud subscription, and I like that I have five sites I can host through Business Catalyst. That's great ... BUT ...
This morning, I decided to use BC hosting for the first time (instead of GoDaddy), and was shocked that none of the sites that come with my Creative Cloud/Business Catalyst subscription includes email. NOT ONE EMAIL ADDRESS IS INCLUDED??! In order to include email in any of the five sites hosted through Business Catalyst, I have to pay an additional $12.21 a month.
Surely, Adobe is smart enought to recognize that Muse designers will want to use Business Catalyst as the hosting hub for all their clients, but Adobe is NOT smart enought to recognize that you have priced yourself out of the market entirely??? GoDaddy offers hosting for $5.99 a month, and the monthly charge has been on sale for $2.99. This GoDaddy hosting plan includes as many email addresses as you want. Why would I go with Business Catalyst and pay four times as much?
Sriously Adobe, please research your competitors pricing, and make your prices competitive!! I would love to use Muse and Business Catalyst exclusively for all my clients and hosting, but I'm not going to pay 4 times more than I need to. Why would I?

Hey cloudnine--
While Liam's post was generally condescending in it's tone, I think he has a valid point. From a web professional's point of view, Muse is a great starting point for graphic designers coming to the web. It's a great tool for a creative department to quickly generate working prototypes that are close to a professional website.
However, there's A LOT more that goes into designing and developing for the web that you need to know about for production-quality websites. Namely, advanced CSS authoring, cross-browser restraints and semantic HTML markup for the benefit of search engines. Not to mention responsive design, image optimization, code minification and other skills required for the "mobile-first" approach which places a heavy focus on reducing network connections and bandwidth. "Mobile-first", responsive design for all screen sizes is the future.
I, too, have seen very impressive Muse sites but many of them feature 1mb, full-color, full sized PNG images all over the place-- slowing the site to a crawl. Sometimes, if people continue to use Muse and Dreamweaver's authoring techniques they miss out on the bigger picture of how to appropriately use stylesheets and write markup that search engines will eat up.
Using Muse and Dreamweaver are great for designers who are wanting to learn to code but I too would recommend getting outside of both those programs on occasion to flex your muscles. You can create a great website with Notepad, an FTP client and a graphics program like Photoshop, Fireworks or even the free GIMP.
A great tool I show people so they can play with markup and styles is http://scratchpad.io. Peep it.
I believe there is a place for us all to coexist and some designer's code authoring levels are different. BC and Muse are a great place for graphic designers publish websites using the Adobe authoring tools but to produce a standards-compliant, feature-rich website you'll eventually need to learn the best practices for HTML/CSS/Javascript.
You're right how most of us web professionals have crappy websites. Mine is too but that's usually because our paying work takes precedence.
Finally, don't get discouraged on this board. There are lots of opinions and Liam is mostly harmless. I think he just types too fast and his head moves faster than his fingers so sometimes his grammar is off but he means well and is one of the most active forum users here for BC.
Best,
Chris

Components will not resize correctly in Catalyst

Download PSD: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/814249/campusariel.psd
Download FXP: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/814249/campusariel.fxp
I am completely new to Flash Catalyst (any and all versions). I am currently using Photoshop CS5.5 to design and Catalyst 5.5 to import and translate into a flash project. I recently picked up a job creating an interactive application for a college campus. I have attached my two project files for anyone who can help to view to see what is wrong. I have also attached inline screenies for those who cannot/will not download.
Here is my problem: I created the attached PSD in Photoshop with what I thought were the correct layers and groups/folders. I am hoping to achieve the following effect: when a user rolls over the purple buttons, multiple similar copies of that button that are initially hidden beneath the visible one popup in sequence above the rolled over purple button.
Ex. State 1:
Animation/Action Sequence to the following:
The purple popup objects will have their own text content and will be buttons themselves that a user clicks to change to a different state with more specific information.
Not only am I unsure of how to create such animation/action sequence, my purple components (whether I actually convert them to components in Catalyst or not) will not resize correctly. NOTE: I did click the resizable option when importing the PSD into Catalyst. The following effect occurs both ways. I add constraints to all objects by selecting all, right clicking, and choosing add constraints to all; the following occurs when stretched inwards using the resize test handle:
and this when stretched out:
When viewed using CTRL+Enter, the application is nowhere near resized in the browser window. I must be missing something, especially being new to Catalyst. I tried flattening the image in Photoshop, which obviously allowed the image to be easily resizable in Catalyst and the test browser window. However, I cannot use my separate elements when flattened; flattening defeats the purpose of Catalyst if I'm not mistaken.
Any guidance?
Message was edited by: joshlev

Hi Martin - Those are really good questions! I did check and the image is uploaded. I assume I can see the image in my one browser because of the cache since I could not see it on several computers that I had never pulled the site up on before.
And actually I have it working now. Nancy had a good idea to check to see if I saved it as CMYK instead of RGB. When I went to go open the file on my computer Photoshop and Fireworks had an error in opening it. They had a problem opening the one I downloaded from the ftp too. It just looks like somehow the file became corrupted! Not sure how, but that seems like what the problem was since I have a new image up there now and it's working fine again.
Thanks for all your help!
Liz

Installing adobe CS5 Fireworks, Exit Code 7?

Hi there,
So I just recently tried to open my copy of Fireworks (never used it before) and it gave me an error saying something about the parameters not working, so I decided to install and reinstall. Unluckily, my computer is now giving me the error that says the following:
Exit Code: 7
-------------------------------------- Summary --------------------------------------
- 1 fatal error(s), 3 error(s), 6 warning(s)
WARNING: Warning: {4687A306-D716-4D7A-B0AA-EAB65D17F149} Adobe Player for Embedding will not be repaired, due to updated patch of STI and one of the top level payload is being installed.
WARNING: Warning: {02731921-5711-4E7A-A898-D6BCF0F2A1CD} Adobe CSXS Infrastructure CS5 will not be repaired, due to updated patch of STI and one of the top level payload is being installed.
WARNING: Warning: {E4E188D2-27D5-4E4C-92CE-87F9D24AD2F6} Adobe Extension Manager CS5 will not be repaired, due to updated patch of STI and one of the top level payload is being installed.
WARNING: Warning: {6A2E619B-E4AC-433B-A648-D458CE543A96} Adobe XMP Panels CS5 will not be repaired, due to updated patch of STI and one of the top level payload is being installed.
WARNING: Warning: {6E505C8F-2896-11DF-9B64-0013724DD917} DeviceCentral will not be repaired, due to updated patch of STI and one of the top level payload is being installed.
WARNING: Warning: {3E7A8DA8-0298-42F2-B927-4DB00E2F8FEE} DeviceCentral_DeviceCentral3LP-en_US will not be repaired, due to updated patch of STI and one of the top level payload is being installed.
ERROR: Found payload conflicts and errors:
ERROR: - Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5 depends on Flash Player to be installed.
ERROR: - Adobe Flash CS5 depends on Flash Player to be installed.
FATAL ERROR: Conflicts were found in the selected payloads. Halting installation.
I have no idea what any of this means and I'm hoping you do. Adobe help desk doesn't offer support anymore.
I bought this as a student license back in 2010.
Please help!

Errors "Exit Code: 6," "Exit Code: 7" | CS5, CS5.5
Mylenium

Can I use Flash with Flash catalyst?

I was wondering, since Flash Catalyst apparently only uses
"rudimentary animation", can I use Flash Professional with Flash
catalyst? I would like to do more complex animations, and I was
wondering if there was a way to import those animations into Flash
Catalyst,

Flash Professional will definitely be the tool for creating
complex animation. The tweaks they have done to the animation
engine will blow away designers giving them intuitive tools to use
for creating animation. Designers will absolutely love how easy it
is to animate now.
As for whether or not Flash Catalyst can handle that... From
the trial software I received at Adobe MAX... it appears you can
import SWFs. In fact, as soon as you import them, they start
playing right there in the IDE. But I am not sure how much control
you have over the SWF once you import it. No SWC import though.
I was curious if there are any round tripping features
between Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst. Because the way I
understand it, Flash Catalyst is a way for traditional designers to
use Fireworks, Illustrator and Photoshop to build RIAs... they said
nothing of using Flash Professional.

Organizing Pages/States in Flash Catalyst

Hi,
is there a way to reorder the Pages/States in Flash Catalyst?
I wonder why Adobe created a whole new Programm for such less features, at least visually seen.
It would be so great if they simply would integrate the code creating feature in FIREWORKS
There we have all that much more advanced states/pages handling...
Just a idea
Cheers
Marc

Hi there,
Here's a post on that:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2500263#2500263
Let us know if it answers your question.
Thanks for posting!
-Kim

Cannot import FXG and Photoshop into Catalyst - error parsing fxg

Update: Fireworks and Photoshop both don't work.
I cannot import anything from a Fireworks FXG file to Catalyst. It errors every time. I even tried creating a couple of simple new files, one was just a box, and it still would not import. I originally thought my fireworks file was too complex, but it is doing the same thing regardless of simple vs. complex files. Please help. I am totally stuck. All my files are in Fireworks.
I am also having an error when I try to import PSD files. I was able to successfully import an AI file.
Error parsing FXG is the error I get from my fireworks files. The weird thing is I have some stuff that worked a couple of weeks ago, it's like it just stopped working.
Thanks in advance for any help.
I guess I should also ask, is this forum an Adobe supported forum, or just a user forum? I guess I should try to contact Adobe directly on this issue.
Bump
Message was edited by: hobbsroy

I am getting the exact same error using Catalyst CS5.5
No matter what file I try it gives the same error even with just a simple box on the page. I've rebooted my computer and that does not solve the problem.

Fireworks vs Catalyst

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