On Monday, we released betas of:

• Flash Catalyst — This is the new product I’ve been primarily working on for the last couple of years: the interaction design tool formerly codenamed “Thermo”. It allows you to take artwork created in the Creative Suite tools and turn it into a working Flash interface. You can publish it as a standalone piece, or give it to a developer to add functionality in…
• Flash Builder 4 — This is the next version of Flex Builder, with a slightly new name and a whole bunch of new features for developer productivity and easy data access. We renamed it Flash Builder in order to emphasize that it’s a tool for building all kinds of Flash applications (including pure-ActionScript apps), aligning it better with our other Flash Platform tools, and reserving the name Flex for…
• Flex 4 SDK — the open-source framework that’s the foundation of both Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4. The biggest feature is the new Spark component architecture, which completely separates the presentation of components from their underlying logic. Without Spark, Flash Catalyst wouldn’t be able to make it so easy to turn artwork into skinned components.

If you do try out Flash Catalyst, check out the great documentation, tutorials and videos page. In addition to content from our Learning Resources team, there are videos from some of the developers on the FC team, and from other folks on our prerelease group. It’ll really help you get up to speed quickly.

As someone who helped start this and this, I can say it’s always a little nerve-wracking to release the first public beta version of a new 1.0 product. You wince at every bug you knew someone was going to run into (and the ones you didn’t know about), and you wish you could just tell everyone “we’re planning to get to it, really!” for all the features that didn’t make the beta, or that you know aren’t even going to make the 1.0 release. But that’s dwarfed by the excitement of having people encounter it for the first time and seeing what they can actually make with it despite its limitations. I’ve already been amazed by what we’ve seen our prerelease group do with Catalyst, and I’m looking forward to see what you can do with it!

So, please back up your database and feed list, download v0.39 TEST and check it out! As always, you can leave comments here on issues that you find, file them at the issue tracker on Google Code, or send me email.

Also, I’m thinking of instituting an “official” beta program for Snackr. The requirements for participation are low:

• be willing to get announcement emails every so often
• download new test builds as they come out and use them for a few days
• answer a quick survey on each build saying how well the build is working for you

If you’re interested, please fill out the beta signup form. Thanks!

Not sure this is a bug I can fix in Snackr; it seems to be some interaction between the input manager and AIR. I might just have to note that Snackr is incompatible with Safari CoolIris. (CoolIris for Firefox seems to work fine.)

(By the way, I just noticed that when I introduced the ecotours comp in this video, I said “I created this design in Adobe Photoshop”. That’s demo-ese for “I’m pretending to be the visual designer in this workflow”; the comp was actually designed by the folks at Gotomedia, who also created a lot of the other assets we used in the day 2 keynote–thanks guys!)

• you’re seeing crashes with Snackr under AIR 1.5, or
• you’re on a MacBook, have AIR 1.5, and are not seeing crashes.

If you are seeing crashes, please post the URL of a feed whose items are causing crashes. (I don’t think the problem is feed-specific, but it’s probably good to check.)

Thanks!

If you’re going to MAX, and you want to be one of the first to get your hands on it, you should sign up for the Introduction to Thermo session, where we’ll be giving out the first DVDs. The first session is full, but there’s some room left in the 5-6 pm session.

This MAX preview version is going to be Mac-only, and only available to MAX attendees. If you’re on Windows or can’t make it to MAX, don’t despair–watch this space for more info.

I’ll also be running a hands-on lab at MAX where I’ll walk attendees through using the Thermo preview build to turn an imported Photoshop comp into a working interactive design. I think the lab sessions are already full, but give it a shot if you’re interested.

Hope to see you at MAX! (And hopefully after MAX I can get back to working on Snackr…)

It’s been awhile since the last test build, but hopefully the new one is worth the wait–thanks to Rob Adams, Snackr v0.38 TEST has an early version of Google Reader integration! If you hook up Snackr to Google Reader, your feed list and read items will be synchronized both ways between the two.

Even if you don’t normally use Google Reader, if you use Snackr on multiple computers (e.g. home and work), it’s handy to sync all of them to Google Reader, so all your feed lists and read items stay in sync across your machines (that’s actually mostly what I use the integration for).

To set up the integration, just go to the Options popup and click on the Google Reader tab, check the checkbox, and enter your Google Reader username and password. You’ll get an option to choose whether you want to use Reader’s feed list or Snackr’s, or merge the two. Once you connect, if you have a lot of feeds in Reader, the ticker might stutter a bit as everything gets synchronized (we hope to improve this in future versions), but after a couple minutes it should clear up.

One important thing to note is that because the feed lists are synchronized, if you delete a feed in Snackr, it will be deleted in Google Reader. We’re hoping to make this optional in the future (so you can choose when deleting a feed in Snackr whether to also delete it in Reader), but for now be aware of this behavior.

Another new feature in this version is a set of helpful tools in the item popup, letting you email the item, post it to del.icio.us/digg, and more. I’m planning to make this extensible in the future, so you can add new tools from the Options popup.

As usual, because this is an early test build, there may be bugs lurking. So:

1. Back up your Snackr database AND your Google Reader feed list first!
   
2. Read the release notes
3. Download the v0.38 build!

And, of course, send us feedback! You can post bugs/feature requests in the issues list, comment here, or send me email. Enjoy!

This version also adds a much-requested feature: the ability to only show items within the last N hours (in previous versions, you could only set this to a number of days). To set this, just go to the Preferences tab of the Options popup, go to “Don’t show items older than”, type the number of hours you want, and choose “hours” instead of “days” from the dropdown.

Finally, this should fix a major bug I introduced in v0.34, where the ticker would permanently freeze after collapsing and re-expanding it in some situations. If you saw this bug before, please let me know if you still see it in this version.

As always, you can leave bug reports/feature requests in comments here, send me email, or file them in the Google Code issue tracker. Thanks!

The first test build, 0.34 TEST, has a few new features and a number of bug fixes. (Sorry, Google Reader integration isn’t in yet, but we’re working on it!) The new features are:

• Implemented ability to “star” items so you can read them later. Click the star icon in the item popup to star an item, then read starred items by clicking the star icon in the ticker tab.
• Added option to configure feed fetch interval globally. This is at the bottom of the Feeds tab in the Options popup. You can also force all feeds to get refreshed here.
• Added option to set transparency of ticker window. This is in the Preferences tab of the Options popup.

The list of bugfixes is detailed in the release notes on the wiki at Google Code. Before installing a test build, you might want to back up your feed database.

If you find any problems, or have thoughts on the new features, please file a bug and note which version you found the bug in. Thanks!