Design and Develop Workflows with CS4

The session had a great premise: how designers and developers could better work better together. I’ve first experience of seeing how designers come up with a Photoshop designs for a Flash app, which means the Flash developer has to build vector graphics from scratch. Also it’s so common to see beautiful Photoshop files that when built in HTML look a bit rough around the edges. There must be a better way. There were circa 200 people in the audience. The panellists did a show of hands to how many people were designers – approx 50%. They asked who used Photoshop approx 90%. They asked who used Cold Fusion and only one person put up their hand. They spent the next 20 minutes talking about “cool” new features in Cold Fusion, while the rest of the audience got bored and angry. Tonnes of people walked out. They then spent the next 20 minutes talking about Dreamweaver and some new cool Ajax features. Not a single mention of how this helps designers. Microsoft have built some great tools around Silverlight development meaning developers and designers use the same tools and don’t have to throw stuff away. I was hoping Adobe were going to share the same. I’ve heard Fireworks has some good capabilities for speeding up web developers. If only they’d covered that. The whole session was a complete waste of time. I walked out with a whole host of others.