I am confused its all too technical and non design oriented

Question

What is Flash Builder, Burrito, Catalyst. Panini - I have used Flash for years and want to create iPad Apps with the technology. I am not a programmer so want to use premade components. All the documentation is confusing and obviously written by engineers - it leaves me more clueless than before. Is there any where I can just get an overall picture of what to do and what to use in what order to achieve a simple throw - nav type App with each screen of content being an interactive page of a childrens book.
I am making the seperate pages in Flash but need to put them all together in a wrapper to make a system that works. I saw something about a throw nav in the Burrito tech page but have no clue how to get it working. I also want to style the look of look of the whole thing, not use the default graphics.
I am going to Refresh in Melbourne on Thursday and hope that this time the presenters will demonstrate more slowly and speak English not GEEK.
Can anyone demytify this whole process and is there anywhere that its explained so us "dumb" designers can understand. Yes I  can write simple code and get around Flash as I used it for years in my job as a mulitmedia designer but I need some help understanding what all these bits do and how to use them. Where is this mystical place where you just drag stuff out a library and use it to create the interface- seems to me from what I have seen in online tutorials you need to create reams and reams of code
Do I first use catalyst or burrito, then what? Do I take it to Flash to Package? I have signed up with Lynda and watched the training on Burrito but it all makes it as clear as mud. Seems like if you want to use Flash and the other bits you need a degree in programming - what happened to it being more designer friendly?

Answer 1

Hello. I am on the other end of the spectrum, vast knowledge in coding but very poor UI skills. My background is almost exclusively Microsoft making it a bit more challenging. Being brand new to Flash Builder but having used Flash 8 a bit I have learned that they really upped the coding knowledge requirements. For example on the button click event  one just gets a click event listener as opposed to a code wizard from flash that normally will do the work.
I've taught remedial programming at a business college in the past and if I had any advice it would be to commit yourself to learning some beginner coding.
For this particular product I would focus on strings, objects, events and methods. I have found some free Flash Builder ebooks searching google books or other online free ebook sites. Most of the non-google sites will allow you to download a complete PDF file.  There is much more Flexbuilder 3 content out there than Flash Builder but Flexbuilder 3 is very similar and will help.
At the end of the day, most of today's RIA tools (Flash Builder, Silverlight etc) are going to require both knowledge in design and coding.