The ability to import a Flash Professional .fla file format into Catalyst would be a great benefit. Especially since there was an official workflow between Flash Pro and Flex 3 for creating graphical, stateful skins for flex (ie File...New...Flex Skins). It seems strange that in the new workflow, Flash is not treated as a first class citizen such as Illustrator or Photoshop. For large libraries of Flash built skins, the process of converting these to Flex 4 skins is quite painful as the current builds of Catalyst merely provide Importing of FXG. When a Flash-created Flex skin symbol is exported as .fxg from Flash, and imported into Catalyst, only the first frame/state is available.

Catalyst can be pretty misleading on the subject of component skinning.

"Convert Artwork to Component" kinda implies that it's gonna convert your artwork to a component. Looking at the code reveals that's exactly what it doesn't do. In fact what it does is convert the artwork to a "spark" skin class. As far as I can tell the only way in Catalyst CS5 to actually create a component is when you "Convert Artwork" to a "Custom/Generic Component". In this case it converts the artwork to a stateful component (and doesn't create a skin). All very misleading.

Catalyst can be pretty misleading on the subject of component skinning.

"Convert Artwork to Component" kinda implies that it's gonna convert your artwork to a component. Looking at the code reveals that's exactly what it doesn't do. In fact what it does is convert the artwork to a "spark" skin class. As far as I can tell the only way in Catalyst CS5 to actually create a component is when you "Convert Artwork" to a "Custom/Generic Component". In this case it converts the artwork to a stateful component (and doesn't create a skin). All very misleading.

In a custom component, I should be able to define my own skin parts and not just states. This will make my component more resuable. For example, I might want to have an icon field in a custom button component. If I can make that icon field a skin part, then I would set the value of the skin part from the properties panel, just like label is set in this way. Limit the different types of skin parts that can be created but get the feature in.