Watch in full 720p. This is a very simple demo that shows how to use some of the new Android 3.0 APIs.

To give Catalyst a try, I decided to write a very simple application to search for photos on Flickr. After 10 minutes in Photoshop, 15 minutes in Catalyst and 15 minutes in Flash Builder 4 I had a working application and I had written only a dozen lines of code.

Despite its qualities, Flash Catalyst has a long way to go. I know this is only the first beta of a 1.0 product but here is a short list of what limitations I encountered after writing a few simple applications:

• The tool sometimes doesn’t feel responsive; I kind of expected this from an Eclipse-based Flex-based application in full screen mode on a 30″ monitor.
• All sizes and positions are hardcoded in absolute coordinates. The lack of support for layouts will definitely make Catalyst a lot less interesting for stand-alone AIR apps.
• There are only a few properties you can manipulate for each widget.
• Round-tripping between Catalyst and Flash Builder is worrisome if you’re not careful.
• Integration with Photoshop is definitely lacking and far from what was announced (or at least I thought was announced.)

The Photoshop integration is the only real issue I have with Catalyst. You can apparently use Illustrator or Fireworks but these are tools I’m not very familiar with. This also means getting new licenses because only CS4 is supported (too bad for my CS3 copy of Illustrator.)

I can’t wait to see what Flash Catalyst 1.0 will end up becoming and what Adobe has in store for the future releases.

Even though Shelves is not quite ready to be release on the Android Market, I decided to publish the source code under the Apache 2.0 license. The application is already usable and lets you add books by searching Google Books or by scanning their barcode (if you have the application called Barcode Scanner installed), search your collection by keywords or barcodes, import books from a CSV file and delete individual books. The only two features I need to implement before releasing Shelves are the ability to manually add/edit a book and to view a book’s details.

If you are curious, you can see Shelves in action in the following video. You can also visit Shelve’s project page for screenshots showcasing several features.

Note: the colors on the video are different from what you would see on an Android device. I created the assets specifically for mobile devices and the colors appear therefore more saturated on a computer monitor.

Ken has a great sense of design, pays great attention to details and his examples are really well written. Even if you do not work with Mac OS X, you’ll find a lot of valuable information on his blog, in particular how a UI developer should deal with details and pixel-perfect designs. I highly recommend you read all of Ken’s posts right now :)