People were packed into the Tom Thomson conference room at FITC to catch Mark Anders show a preview of Flash Catalyst, the upcoming Adobe tool to design Flex applications.

Mark mentioned that Adobe's Ted Patrick recording the session and that video would eventually be available online on tv.adobe.com. With Adobe Max, this meant videos would be available a couple of months after the conference. Well, looks like they streamlined the process, as a video of the session was made available earlier this afternoon!

Here's the video:

However some highlights for those who don't have time to watch the hour long video right now:

• Mark was using a very fresh build of Flash Catalyst from code that had been completed last Thursday.
• Flash Catalyst will not be available as a Eclipse plugin like Flex Builder when it is released, as it was made as designers tool not a developers tool. There's also a technical reason, as Mark mentions this is because they chopped up Eclipse to make their Flash Catalyst and currently it won't work at a plugin.
• "Not your grandfather's flex code" is a great line Mark jokes as he shows the underlining Flex 4 code being generated in Flash Catalyst. :)
• Adobe continues to be tight lipped about the public beta, but note that the Flex 4 framework currently set to go into beta this June.
• When converting skins into Flex components, Flash Catalyst will provide a list of required skins and optional ones for the component to work properly. And when skins are missing Flash Catalyst will provide a compatibility warning.

Tags: FITCToronto, Flash Catalyst