Starting today Radiate IDE is an open source project. Radiate is to you and I a hybrid of Flash Builder design view, Flash Catalyst, Dreamweaver with some elements of PS and AI and code generation.
Here's the fancy formal marketing description: *Product* *Radiate is a multiplatform web and application design and development program that changes the way software is made. With Radiate anyone can create professional website, web application or mobile app within a visual design environment in a fraction of the time without loss of functionality. Since you can generate and then view the code from a visual design it can be used as a learning tool. It can also run in the browser giving you the ability to work or comment on a project without installing software. Since it supports multiple programming languages you can use it with the language of your choice. It also integrates with Wordpress to allow you to visual design and edit themes. * *It is not only a developer tool. Just as much attention is given to the designer. A designer can import a Photoshop design and continue to work on it with the features they know and love. But now they can add interactivity to it and turn it into a website or application.* *If you have ever done any of of these you will know the tremendous amount of work that is involved. With this software what used to take weeks or months will now take days. * *Technology * *When creating any type of software you use multiple pieces of technology. Photoshop and Illustrator are used to design the prototype, mockup tools are used to test the UI, code tools are used to write the software and rarely are they compatible with each other. * *In application and website development half of the project is converting the design into workable code. You must export the designs piece by piece and then write code that reproduces the design. If the client changes the design weeks of work may have to be converted again. This conversion is done on the fly with this software. * *This work is built in such a way that it can be used as a foundation to build additional products such as Text Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations and so on to create a Google Drive, Microsoft Office, etc. where multiple types of documents are available and compatible with each other (partially through MXML input and output) to be updated and exported to other formats and languages. * *Notes* This is in an progress project. While what is there took a lot of work this isn't a complete design studio type of project; it's more like a getting started type of thing. It's direction is based on the community. I'd like it to be a foundation we can improve on and use to build great software. You can read more on goals and setup here <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLEX/Setting+up+the+Radiate+Development+Environment>. It's made the way it is because I want a tool that will do all or part of my job for me. For example, right now it's just at the early point where I can create a design and layout it will generate the HTML markup and CSS or MXML and I can copy and paste that into my project. That's what I'm using it for now but I hope it will be able to augment my work much more in time. It's not there yet. I'd like to be able to get a psd or image and import that into the program and then create the layout over the top of the background image. Then have that markup to use where I need it. I can also import basic MXML and it will generate HTML markup. That's useful to me. I'd also like to get more people into Flex. We can put this up online and let people create a layout visually and see the MXML and how easy it is to export that to an app or website. But what you need it to do may be different. We need to think about where want it to be a year from now. Let me know your thoughts.
