In Adobe Flash Catalyst the states concept is really important but a little bit hard to understand immediately, let’s try to catch the sense of it together.
With this new Adobe tool for designer, working on Rich Interactive Applications will be a lot easier and the cooperation with developers will be as close as it has never been before. The software interface is not the final one, the version available now is a beta, but still we can use many functionalities. Flash Catalyst is different from other Adobe design tools, maybe who use Flash will be familiar with the general approach.
The states in Flash Catalyst are referred to Pages and to elements inside a page and they represent different views of the application. We navigate between different states but in the same way they can be referred also to a component, for instance a button has state such as Up, Over, Down, and Disabled.
In the interface the right side is dedicated to tools and panels as Libraries, Layers and Properties, up to the stage there are indications about pages, components and states.
I created a very simple application as an example that has two pages Start and End, where you can click on a button “click here” to switch to different states/pages.
In Flash Catalyst interface you can find the states also on the left side of the Timeline. Here you find the States transitions panel, remember that in this tools transitions are taken as separate parts of the entire navigation, this means that you must put properties thinking of a "round trip".
When you double click on components their states are displayed on the same part where the pages/elements are and this can be a little bit tricky, maybe the component state should be represented in a different way, graphically speaking. Anyway as in Flash, we can always go back to the previous element using the menu up on the left side of the stage.
We can say that the states represent the condition/status of pages and components, more generally the concept indicate what an element is doing before and when users interact with it.