Adobe is working on a promising product called Catalyst that aims to allow designers working on Illustrator/Photoshop templates to convert them into Adobe Flex UI screens (mxml). It is promising because from what I've seen so far the mxml isn't very developer friendly.
The aim, of course, is for the designer to generate the exact look and feel for the wireframes and render them (using Catalyst) to MXML for the Adobe Flash/Flex developer to code in the behavior/functionality. Catalyst will require Flex Builder 4 (which will not be out until 2nd half of 2009).
Adobe (and the assimilated Macromedia) are the state of the art at UI for designers (Photoshop; Flash authoring tools). While they can include interactivity for many standard widgets (much as Word includes code for many standard typographical symbols), they can't customize the interactivity within the tool. It still needs developers, who must work with the generated code...
OTOH, there's an argument that standard interaction is a good thing, so maybe a lack of customization/abstraction isn't so bad?
I've created a 'Discuss YC: Adobe Flex' thread. Perhaps we can use that as an anchoring point for discussing Flex on News.YC (I read the guidelines - it seems to be not explicitly dis-allowed)
The aim, of course, is for the designer to generate the exact look and feel for the wireframes and render them (using Catalyst) to MXML for the Adobe Flash/Flex developer to code in the behavior/functionality. Catalyst will require Flex Builder 4 (which will not be out until 2nd half of 2009).
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/
FXG (the interchange format spec):
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/FXG+1.0+Spe...
As an aside, I work on a large project (at least 10 UI developers) that uses Flex. We don't even use the GUI builder.