Durango and PatchPanel

There's two more new Flash-related technologies at Adobe Labs today. PatchPanel is a library that will let you script some of the CS3/4 tools from Flex. If you attended Dr. Woohoo's session at FOTB, you may have seen an early preview of these powerful tools. Durango on the other hand is a rapid prototyping tool for AIR applications that has some rough edges. Is it the wrong solution to the right problem?.

PatchPanel is two SWC libraries (one for CS3 and one for CS4) that allows Flex developers to create their own panels that extend the native functionality in Photoshop, Illustrator, Bridge and Indesign. More or less every aspect of these applications can be scripted from Flex, such as adding layers, drawing shapes, adjust text kerning, the list goes on.

If you use templates templates a lot, you can now have them created, filled out based on dynamic text input and printed. Virtually any tool or plugin a designer would like to have, can be created by a programmer. You write the code in Flex, pack it up and install it as a custom panel inside the designers software. Drew Trujillo demonstrated this at FOTB using an early version of the product and we have to say we were impressed.

Durango

Durango is a mash-up tool that was shown in the Sneak Peeks session at MAX yesterday. I took it for a spin and it didn't impress that much in it's current form, but it has potential. The idea is novel - prototype AIR applications using drag and drop, then export the code to Flex Builder to make it interactive. There's reusable components for non-visual things such as Web Services and visual components for things like Google Maps, Video Playback, Buzzword integration, weather data. Throw in the components you need in your app and the Flex Project is created for you. Sounds like a great idea, doesn't it?

We did some testing and the process is easy but not outright intuitive. Right click the desktop where you want the new AIR project to be and select "New AIR Application". You then select one of the pre-built templates that offers custom/standard chrome and auto/manual layout. Next you open another Durango app and drag and drop the components you want to use. So far, all good.

When you have all the components you need, you export this as a Flex project. The Durango app writes all the required project files to a new folder and then you just need to import this in Flex. Easy? Not really. Only on the third attempt the tool managed to export Flex code that was compilable.

Just from our quick test, we found that this is really Preview/Beta quality. The code generated for the components are undocumented and surely needs some massaging. We found a comment stating "Future feature, disable for Labs release" just above a command called EvaluationModeSupport (interesting!). The "SimpleDonor" app is terribly sluggish on my MacBook Pro, even with no other apps running. This could have been solved much more elegantly by making a component-browser that let you pick and drag components from a listbox and only show one preview at a time.

This is alright given that this is a pre-release version, but this clearly requires some more work. Being able to throw in the native Flex components and constraints would be cool as well, but re-creating the Flex Design View is probably asking too much from an AIR application. This also makes me think - wouldn't it be wiser just to make proper Flex components out of the Durango ones and rather use Flex for this prototyping?

 

 

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