At first I was only moderately impressed with the speech-to-text transcription feature offered in Premiere CS4. It seemed cool but not something I thought we would use with any regularity. As was evidenced by some of the sessions I attended at MAX, my thinking about the possibilities this feature has to offer was a bit short-sighted.

Flash Catalyst (announced at MAX ‘07 as Thermo) is an application that allows designers and developers to share one file type while creating Flex applications without disrupting each other’s workflow.

It features familiar tools that designers will feel right at home with and imports Photoshop and Illustrator files seamlessly. What it offers that those programs don’t, however, is the ability for designers to easily create front-end interactivity, such as rollover states, transitions, and drop-down menus without having to rely on a programmer. It writes native MXML files that developers can in turn open in Flex for back-end implementation. Since Catalyst and Flex share the same data type, these files can be bounced back and forth between the two applications without compromising design integrity. This is huge ... if you are building Flex apps, that is.

XFL is a format new to CS4 that allows After Effects animators to export their compositions to Flash without flattening all layers. Supported features are converted to Flash layers while unsupported features are converted to FLV with or without alpha channels. XFL files can be opened in Flash with layers intact and saved as FLA files, giving developers precise control over elements that previously were flattened into SWFs or FLVs.

In addition to 2008 being a banner year for business at Mightybytes, it also marked a possibly more important milestone: we learned how to brew our own beer. Thanks to the brewing prowess and educational wisdom of Jared Saunders from Little Green Cube, we have made four successful batches so far, three of which were so well received by clients and friends at our ‘08 holiday party that the supply barely lasted an hour.

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