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As a registered Flash developer, I get emails from Adobe here and there begging me to take one of their 1,000 surveys, promising that the 200 multiple choice questions will only take 2 minutes of my time. However, today (or rather 20 minutes ago) I was alerted of a new Adobe product called Flash Catalyst. Something caught my eye in the email, the phrase, "Without writing code." I was terrified, as the whole reason I love software is because of the awesome code behind it.
I downloaded the Beta testing version for free to see what it's like, and I've assessed that there are 2 possibilities:
1) Catalyst may be popular for a little while and then will die out quickly without any real applications, much like Carnegie Mellon's Alice program.
2) Catalyst will eclipse Flash and ActionScript 3.0 and put nearly every Flash programmer in the world out of a job. Fast food restaurants will be populated with millions of would-be programming geniuses, and the world will stop spinning as a result.
Call me old fashioned, but I'm rooting for scenario #1, were's the fun in programming without writing code?
Of course, there's a middle ground to this, maybe Catalyst will be only a little popular, and only a few hundred thousand programmers will lose their jobs.
You can download Catalyst off of Adobe's website for free, here's my impression after 10 minutes of using it.
Catalyst looks a lot like Flash CS4, its pretty clean cut and elegant, as with most Adobe products. The user draws or imports an object, much like in Flash, and selects what the object is (i.e. button), then chooses what role it plays (i.e. onClick), and finally decides what action it takes (i.e. play video). No code. At all.
I'm a bit worried, and annoyed after buying Flash CS4 which may become obsolete (worst case scenario) as a result of Catalyst.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Flash Catalyst: Programming without coding?
Posted by Brennon at 6:42 PM
Labels: computer science
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2 comments:
Brennon, you never fail to make me bored while reading your posts. Whenever one comes up in my e-mail, I always click to read it right away. I'm not lying here.
I completely agree with you that programming without code will take ALL the fun out of it. What's more fun than sitting in front of your computer thinking for 30 minutes?
And I also agree that this program will put a lot of Flash programmers out of business.
I can't wait for your next post, and Congrats Brennon on having such a great blog.
I wouldn't worry. I hope it does succeed. The more people can do the better. This just means that we, as programmers, must also elevate ourselves and do better things. There will always be a need for code. This product just means that an average user can do some awesome Flash things, which again, I think is a good thing. But if/when Flash becomes available to the masses, then companies will look for bigger and better solutions in order to stand out and that is when they will still need programmers, so don't lose faith!
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