Thermo-licious

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ThermoToday you guys all got to see what I’ve been privy to for a little while – Thermo (Peter Elst recorded the session for those who missed it). The general response seems to be incredibly positive. And rightly so because I think Thermo is going to let a lot of different people create much better RIAs. And I mean better in a lot of ways. More interactive, more usable, and more beautiful.

It’s all possible because Thermo is a jewel of the designer-developer workflow. We can rely on Adobe’s incredible experience in creating design tools with our growing and powerful development framework, Flex. A good designer-developer workflow is so important to creating great RIAs. You only get great experiences when you combine the right brain of a designer with the left brain of the developer and let them collaborate.

Thermo does that and it shores up what I think are some of the weak points of Flex (namely the ability to create a customized experience). I think this is going to be a tool that developers as well as designers will jump into. I also think it’s going to help usher in a new wave of Interaction Designers. I have a post about this later, but I think this is the start of an expanding world for RIAs which will tie back to current roles on web sites.

[tags]Thermo, Adobe, Interaction Designers[/tags]

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  • Marlon Smith

    This is pretty cool…

  • Ethan Estes

    all us dev-signers out here say “thank you!”

  • Marlon Smith

    After digesting Thermo a little more and comparing Thermo to Blend. I noticed how the two products use different approaches to solving the same problem, designer/developer workflow.

    Thermo enables designers to start from visuals and incrementally turn visuals to controls to interactions to an almost complete experience. This is a natural extension to the way designers work while at the same time emitting MXML and preserving the visual details. This is really compelling coupled with cross-platform tools and runtimes, yet the developer side (too me) still needs some work.

    Blend enables some of the same, but its focus seems to start with controls and then allows designers to apply styles to them. This is more natural to developers, yet still enables excellent vector graphic manipulations and layout. Microsoft has the developer side set, nothing really comes close, when you look at the entire platform (tools, servers, community). Blend and Design are 1.0 products, and they defiantly feel that way. With Blend 1.0 I still have to know too much about WPF, the tool should embody my most common scenarios and make them super easy to do. Let’s not even talk about Design.

    So I’m really impressed with Thermo, it has great tool intelligence and I’m hoping to see more complex scenarios covered. Blend 2.0 Sept. preview has some great new features, hoping to see more productivity enhancements and better integration with Design. Design needs to get a whole lot better and fast!!

    Great job Adobe!

  • http://www.qoove.com Alex

    When will it be availiable. I NEED IT SO MUCH!!!

    Ryan please, please invite me to the earliest closed alpha what-so-ever…

  • Sean

    Couldn’t be a MAX but watched the videos of the demo. It looks like a great tool for designers and will save me (a developer) the pain of creating prototypes that look good enough to demo. Please let me know when an alpha will be released and if I could get my hands on one.
    Cheers

  • thinnan

    Having tried everything from everyone at least once, Adobe’s tools are the absolute best. Even raw alpha releases exhibit more thoughtful and creative attention to usage and usability, and more powerfully compelling output than competing products’ ostensibly more mature v1 releases.

    Adobe proves that there’s more to delivering robust, delightfully powerful and expressive tools than rushing to market with crappy, also-ran vaporware. Looking forward to the great stuff on the horizon from Adobe!

  • David

    Ryan,
    This is really a taste of things to come – and it’s going to be VERY disruptive to the development community, IMHO.

    First of all, you called it, a long time ago, on this blog (pre-Adobe). My mis-understanding at the time was around the whole “devigner” idea.

    After seeing “thermo”, and sitting in on some fireworks sessions at MAX, it’s not about the “devigner”, it’s about the designer, taking a vision to a working application and not losing anything in translation, in between.

    I think the path of the traditional developer has changed so much in the past 10 years, and it’s going to change even more in the next 10. Will the designer and business analyst be the pain focal point of an application, and the developer just be the guy who plugs in the data from the DB? Will he/she even do THAT?

    Great demo at MAX, and will be interesting to keep track of.

    Cheers,

    Davo

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  • http://www.lifemp3.net mp3

    good blog

  • http://www.smsalien.com Sheen

    When is Thermo going to be released?

    I have subscribed to your RSS, hope to hear more on this in the new future, looks very promising.

    Hope it won’t be to long, if I am able to be a beta tester or help in any other way, please contact me and let me know.

    Thank you