Yesterday (10.06.2009) at Adobe Systems Romania offices took place the Adobe User Groups Tour – Bucharest Pit Stop event. The event was a success – great things presented. Even all tickets were sold out long time before the event only 40 persons showed up at the event.

The event was about new beta products that were launched by Adobe at the beginning of this month: Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4 SDK. But you already knew this by reading the event’s agenda.

What we learned…

• Flash Catalyst is a product targeting the designers
• Flash Catalyst integrates with Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks and Flash Builder 4
• Flash Catalyst makes use of some Flash Professional concepts and interactions
• Flex 4 SDK has language modifications but the both Halo and Spark components can be used together
• Separation of behavior from appearance
• Some Halo components will not be present in Spark
• New graphical primitives in Flex 4 SDK which are not derived from UIComponent (MXML Graphics Library)
• New FXG format based in MXML understood by Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, After Effects, Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder
• New Flash Text Engine
• 2-way binding
• Advanced CSS
• New states
• Flash Builder 4 Plugin for Eclipse can be installed over a Zend Studio this way having debugging in both Actionscript/Flex and PHP
• New tab in Flash Builder 4 – Data Services
• Drag and drop binding to components
• Lots of new wizards to easy and increase the productivity
• Package explorer
• Getter/setter/event handlers generators
• Network monitor
• New FXP file type used by Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4

… and other things not mentioned here.

The Bucharest Pit Stop wasn’t recorded neither transmitted through Adobe Connect so who was present got home with new info about the Flash Platform and some stuff from Adobe and Fx{r}.

Presentations and source files from the event are available at the end. Still have to tell you that some of the presentations are in Romanian but most of them are in English.

Other articles about the event:
http://groups.adobe.com/posts/bdbc2a5190
http://myadobe.ro/2009/06/10/flex-4-tour-bucharest-pit-stop/