Two announcements from Adobe today. 

First the bad news…

… and an average 10% hike in the price of CS4 suites and apps blamed on “currency fluctuations.” 

It is true that the pound has fallen against the dollar since CS4 was launched as I pointed out in a previous post.  However it has been rising steadily since and is now at a 7-month high. 

More to the point the original UK price included a whopping 30% mark-up over the dollar pricing so to say that this rise seems unfair is an understatement.  Especially as the main reason for the mark-up in the first place (as given to our very own Jon Honeyball) was precisely to avoid such fluctuations.

However I can’t see Adobe changing its mind so, if you know you’re going to be buying in the near future, it makes sense to do it before the price hike takes effect on July 1st.

On to brighter news and the announcement of the beta availability of Adobe Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder), Adobe Flash Catalyst and the open source Flex 4 framework, all now available from the Adobe Labs site. 

The main interest here is the brand-new app, Flash Catalyst, previously codenamed “Thermo”.

Adobe is constantly pushing the benefits of Flash as a RIA platform but while the technology has long been there to produce the results, the authoring apps just didn’t do the platform justice. To turn that around Adobe first had to provide an IDE that would work for developers hence Flex Builder, but that effectively cut the designer out of the loop.

Which is where Flash Catalyst comes in. Catalyst is designed to act as a bridge letting designers produce the interface visually (starting with Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks) and then pass on the resulting Flex markup to the developer. 

Sound familiar? Yes, it’s not just Microsoft that is playing catch-up with Adobe; Adobe is having to play catch up with Microsoft too. It’s another example of Flash/Flex/MXML and Expression/Silverlight/XAML shamelessly copying each other.