Adobe BrowserLab and Flash Catalyst

Posted At : June 12, 2009 12:13 PM | Posted By : Rob
Related Categories: User Group

This week, I did a user group meeting on two exciting new technologies from Adobe - BrowserLab and Flash Catalyst. Briefly, BrowserLab is a new hosted service (meaning that it's an online tool hosted by Adobe) that allows you to test web pages in a variety of browsers that you may not have installed on your computer. Currently, it tests on Firefox 2 and 3 and IE 6 and 7 on XP, and Firefox 2 and 3 and Safari 3 on Mac. So as a Windows user running IE8 on Vista, I at last have a way to find out what my page looks like on IE 6 and on a Mac. Pretty cool.

Flash Catalyst is the newest tool in the Flash Platform. Catalyst allows you to take designs created in Photoshop or Illustrator and easily convert them to Flex-based Flash applications.

You can view the recording of the meeting if you want to get more information on either technology and to see my demos.

Because the Catalyst demos ended up taking longer than I had planned, we are going to continue the discussion about Catalyst at our August meeting. This session will also be recorded, and I'll post the details then.

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Hi Rob, I might ask the question in wrong section. I just buy your book XML: Your visulal blueprint to creating expert websites using XML, XHTML, CSS, and XSLT (2008), just start learning about the XML. Wondering if you can introduce some websites that are driven by XML in html, flash... Then I will have an idea what I will achieve. If you can get back to me would be great. Thanks a lot. Cheers
Sin Beer

# Posted By Sin Beer | 6/15/09 2:50 AM

@Sin - I don't know of that many, to be honest. There's not particular way to tell just from looking at a site. I know that shop.starwars.com uses an XML back-end ... but only because their file extension is .xml.
As for Flash ... most Flash-based sites that need back-end data, regardless of the format, are going to be done in Flex. You can check out a bunch of sample Flex apps, almost all with XML-based back-ends, at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/. Hope that helps.

# Posted By Rob Huddleston | 6/16/09 11:45 AM

Does your book, "Mastering Visually" for Dreamweaver and Flash CS4 apply for the student version of CS4 as well?

# Posted By Heidi | 7/1/09 1:32 PM

There's nothing at all special about the student edition, other than the price, so yes everything in the book will apply.

# Posted By Rob Huddleston | 7/1/09 2:10 PM

I'm going to buy the PDF version of your book this morning.
I'll let you know what I think as I work through it.

Regards!
Rich

# Posted By Rich | 7/9/09 9:30 AM

I didn't know my books were available in PDF form. Out of curiosity, where are you buying it from?

# Posted By Rob Huddleston | 7/9/09 9:53 AM

Pardon me for not stating it earlier but its
your new Flash book I'm talking about.

From the Wiley Website.

# Posted By Rich | 7/9/09 12:58 PM

Wow, that's pretty cool. I really had no idea that they made PDFs of the books available.

# Posted By Rob Huddleston | 7/9/09 1:28 PM

HTML,XHTML, and CSS.
I Brought your book and the site, "www.html2008vb"; is not working. I brought the book because of the companion website. Can you tell me what the new site address is?

# Posted By docmover | 7/29/09 11:18 AM

@docmover - See this post: http://www.robhuddleston.com/index.cfm/2008/9/21/H...

# Posted By Rob Huddleston | 9/19/09 1:59 PM

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