Rest In Peace Flash Catalyst

I just heard the news and I can't believe it!  I don't know what we're gonna do! We are designers and visualists, not developers. Although we are not formally trained in interactive design, from time to time we get jobs that require us to flesh out little interactive elements with some basic functions– in the past, we almost always ended up sending it out to our sister agency where our  developers were up to their necks in more important  work to have to worry about a simple Flash element because we can't figure it out. It took us FOREVER in Flash to figure it out! Thankfully, these jobs are not very frequent, but when we got them, it was hell!
When we discovered Catalyst, everything was soooo much easier. We could design  elements in Illustrator and export them to FC, dump some actions on elements and  we're done! The jobs serve  as a mockup to give the client an idea of how it'll all interact. When the client approves the work, our sister agency handled all the real coding. Before FC, we had to send out most of our work making our developers across the state work double hard.
Flash made it 300x's harder for our designers to figure a simple little thing and many times it involved actionscripting. With Catalyst, it was as easy as 1.2.3.
Some of the designers here are a little flustered because we are all getting the feeling that our jobs are in jeopardy– recently my agency was in talks of consolidating hires and boarding people with multiple talents. Meaning a Flash developer who could design was better than just a designer. It's kind of stupid if they decide to purge our team. Although we don't code, we still have a lot on our plate. Coding is not our specialty nor our forté, but we make the extra effort to please the higher ups. Flash Catalyst was our little secret saviour. I just wished Flash was a little more designer friendly.
Big sigh...
Rest in peace Catalyst. 

I understand your pain. My best advice is to invest in learning jQuery. It has a broad level of support and would start to fill in some gaps that now exist. I do feel that designers should have some knowledge of coding. And developers should have some level of understanding of design.
There are alot of great resources to assist.
Good luck,
Chris

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