Last week at Web 2.0, I presented a session on Designer/Developer workflow using Flash Catalyst CS5 and the rest of the Creative Suite 5 design tools including the new CS Review service.

You can see the presentation in this Acrobat Connect recording.

Today on Adobe Labs, we have released WorkflowLab Beta 2. WorkflowLab is a utility built using Flex 4, Flash Catalyst CS5 and has been updated to use the new AIR 2.0 SDK.

As a tool to help plan, map, track and share workflow and best practices, WorkflowLab has added a number of significant features to work better with iterative-style workflows and to give you more valuable linking and discipline mapping capabilities for workflow items that you build with WorkflowLab.

WorkflowLab Beta 2 includes the following features:

Agile Workflow Support
Easily create agile or iterative-based workflows using more flexible task arrangement, labeled rows and drag and drop task manipulation.

Expanded iterative duration support
Expansion of duration grids to support iterations and sprints for agile-based workflows

Discipline Maps
Visually show and capture discrete details in the design and develop disciplines. Build a discipline map through an easy-to-use visual interface to capture the type and unique combination of design and development skills required.

Folder Project Format
WorkflowLab now uses a folder-based project format to package images, sample files, projects, videos and other documentation and resources for easy distribution to teams or the public.

WFX Spec and Schema
Generate and build workflows based on the WFX specification for conversion, import/export, or other product integration.

Updated Product Resources
Updated Adobe products and technologies based on Creative Suite 5, Flex 4, and other related products and technologies

Integrated Image and Video Viewer
Quickly view images and videos within WorkflowLab without needing to open another application.

AIR 2 Support
Updated and rebuilt to use the AIR 2.0 SDK to take advantage of runtime performance improvements and other enhancements.

Print
Print documents of the workflow task chart to share with clients, team members or the public.

Squiggly Support
Author annotations and comments with integrated spell checking and error notification.

User Interface Improvements
Additional Command Bar actions, new menu options, and refinements to the task detail panel. Updated application chrome to support native operating system window resizing and window manipulation.

Keyboard Shortcut Improvements
Additional keyboard shortcuts for fast task creation and fine-tuned positioning and arrangement.

Help Documentation
New documentation to get started quickly with WorkflowLab

Revised Workflow Starting Points
Revised workflow starting points to capture new product types for Creative Suite 5 and Flash Player 10.1.

Netbook Resolution Support
Reduced window foot-print to support lower resolution netbook screens.

Bug Fixes and Minor Enhancements
Numerous bug fixes and performance improvements throughout the product.

I’ll be posting more information on WorkflowLab Beta 2 over the next few weeks. For now you can download WorkflowLab Beta 2 at Adobe Labs!

Adam Cath from the Flash Catalyst CS5 team provided some information on the new features that are part of Flash Catalyst CS5 over the earlier Beta 2 release.

From his post on Adobe’s forum:

Below is a list of the major changes between Flash Catalyst Beta 2 and CS5, which is now available for preorder (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashcatalyst/).

- Overall polish: improved performance, stability, and completeness. We aimed to filled in the most obvious gaps in the most common workflows.

- Large performance improvements for larger projects. You can now work on a large project indefinitely without running out of memory.

- New “Edit in Photoshop” feature allows you to make fine visual changes to a project created from a Photoshop file, or any individual bitmap.

- New “Convert to linked image” feature optimizes your deployed SWF size by loading the image at runtime, rather than embedding it in the SWF.

- New “Sound Effect” action allows you to play a sound during a timeline.

- New helper effects now appear in the timeline (denoted in yellow). These help you producing smooth transitions in certain complex cases.

- More options when creating smooth transitions in the timeline.

- New “Rasterize” feature quickly and easily converts structured artwork to a bitmap.

- The HUD is smaller, streamlined, and more helpful. The new “Optimize” section gives you easy access to commands that will minimize the SWF size and maximize the performance of your project.

- You can now edit screenreader label (“accessibility text”) for components in the properties panel.

- You can now paste bitmaps into Flash Catalyst from the clipboard.

- Flash Catalyst is now localized into French, German, Japanese, and Korean, with the ability to set the language from the preferences dialog.

- New project updater upgrades Beta 2 projects to CS5.

- Approximately two thousand bug fixes and small enhancements.

Thanks Adam for posting this information!

Last Thursday, I presented “CS5 in a Flash”; showcasing some of the new features in Creative Suite 5 including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash Professional, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst and also our new CS Review service.

The videos can be viewed via USTREAM.tv

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

I’m pleased to announce that the Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4 have launched and are available for download from Adobe’s website.

With the release of Flex 4, making high-quality web and desktop applications has never been easier. For a developer, you can quickly connect to data services, code with greater efficiency, monitor network activity, and profile and optimize your application. For designers, Flex 4 introduces the new Spark skinning architecture, unlocking expressive visual and interactive design capabilities like never before. For application developers, the release of ColdFusion Builder and its integration with Flash Builder 4 makes it faster and easier to create rich data-driven applications that are up and running in no time.

Also, I want to congratulate the Flex, Flash Builder, and ColdFusion Builder teams for their amazing work in producing such a monumental release. As an employee and as a customer, I’m really excited about Flex 4. Very soon, we’ll also be sharing more about Flash Catalyst and complete the toolset, so stay tuned!

The Flex team has released an update to the 3.5 SDK that addresses an issue with the Flex-based AIR auto-update UI packaged within the SDK (SDK-24766). The refreshed build, SDK 3.5a, has only a few files modified in order to fix this issue and this change does not affect the signing and caching of the SDK 3.5 RSLs originally released in December.

We encourage all developers using SDK 3.5 to upgrade their build to SDK 3.5a to continue their development. The SDK 3.5a can be found in the “Latest Milestone Release Build” table here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3.

I’m happy to announce that the WorkflowLab Beta is now live on Adobe Labs. WorkflowLab beta includes lots of new features that make it easier to build, share, and track workflows and get started on new projects using workflow best practices.

WorkflowLab includes the following new features:

• Custom Tool Support: Author workflows using customized tools from a selection of types including applications, frameworks, libraries, services, vendors, people or resources
• Categories: Classify workflow tasks or activities using color coded customizable categories
• Duration Grid: Overlay tasks on a customizable duration grid to add temporal context to workflows
• Completion Status: Monitor and track your workflow progress by applying completion statuses to your workflow tasks
• Rich Text Editing: Enhance your workflow task annotations with rich text editing capabilities and inline web links
• Command Bar: Improve your efficiency in creating workflows using the new command bar for point and click authoring capabilities
• Associated Link: Associate web links with workflow tasks for additional task background or to associate with related content on the Internet or internal networks
• Search for Tool: Search within the Adobe tool list for fast selection of related tools to associate to tasks
• Updated Workflow Starting Points: Revised workflow starting points that take advantage of new Beta features
• Status Bar: Get additional feedback within the application through the new status bar
• Collapsible Details Panel: Maximize your workflow authoring workspace by hiding the detail panel.
• Duplicate Task: Quickly take an existing task and duplicate its associated tools, categories and annotation to speed up task authoring

WorkflowLab was created with Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder and the Flex 4 framework. We’ll be posting more information on how we made WorkflowLab over the next few weeks, and you can submit feedback on WorkflowLab to the Adobe Labs forum.

Also check out my previous posts on the features of WorkflowLab:

• WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Usability and Interface Enhancements
• WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Duration-Based Grids
• WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Workflow Item Links
• WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Task Status
• WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Categories
• WorkflowLab Beta Preview: Custom Tools
• WorkflowLab Beta Preview

I’d love to hear from you about WorkflowLab, send your comments to the Adobe Labs forum and I hope you enjoy the new beta!

This preview post will cover a number of collective enhancements we’ve made to WorkflowLab making it easier to use the application more efficiently.

Collapsable Detail Panel

The first is the ability to toggle the display of the detail panel. This helps maximize the viewing space for the workflow to better work with larger and more complex workflows.

Command Bar

We have added a new command bar at the top of the application window to make it easier to use WorkflowLab with your mouse.

Duplicate Task

When building complex workflow items with several associations, annotations, links and other information it can be tedious to do that over and over again. To help, the WorkflowLab beta release adds a new duplicate task feature that creates a copy of the selected task.

Rich Text Editing

To help give you more annotation options, the WorkflowLab beta adds in a basic rich text editor that you can use when you annotate your workflow and workflow item details. This feature supports basic formatting for bold, italic, underline and font sizes. In addition, you can create web links within annotations that when licked will launch a browser and take you to the link.

The rich text editor is working with the latest text formatting features of Flex 4 and there are a few issues currently with it, but we hope to iron out the kinks in the next release.

The current release of WorkflowLab is available at Adobe Labs (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/workflowlab) and uses Adobe AIR. Stay tuned for more upcoming features in WorkflowLab beta!

A workflow takes place over time with a starting point and an ending point. The alpha version of WorkflowLab didn’t give you any visual indicator regarding how long that workflow actually took, making it difficult to understand the workflow’s scale and scope.

With the beta release of WorkflowLab we have added the ability to customize the grid of your interactive chart to represent intervals of time to give your workflow items a grid to help add more information regarding the workflow’s time. When you create a new workflow, you are able to define the type of grid you want. You can use the freeform grid that is on by default, or define a duration based grid and define the intervals of the grid and the visual gaps of the grid.

With a duration based grid, the gridlines on the interactive chart display duration markers at the top that you can use as guides for your workflow items.

While not a true duration based system, the duration grids help add more duration based information to your documented workflows.

We have made other enhancements and improvements to WorkflowLab, and we are all excited to release it and get it in your hands and get your additional feedback on the product. I’ll be providing more information on the WorkflowLab beta when it is released on Adobe Labs at (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/workflowlab).

Another feature that was originally planned with the alpha but wasn’t able to make it was the ability to associate web links with workflow items. With the WorkflowLab beta, we have been able to get that feature in to give workflows added annotation and documentation capabilities by linking them to external resources or materials.

Within WorkflowLab, when you select a workflow item, you will see a new category on the details panel on the right hand side called “Links”. You can add a new link and provide a web address and label for the link and it will be associated with the workflow item.

Clicking on the link will launch your browser and take you to the link. Any valid URL can be associated with a workflow item and links can be removed and edited after you add them to your workflow.

The current release of WorkflowLab is available at Adobe Labs (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/workflowlab) and uses Adobe AIR. Stay tuned for more upcoming features in WorkflowLab beta!