A Tool for Designers Who Want to Code

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Before Thanksgiving there was a post by Rick Barraza that caught my eye. He was talking about transitioning from Flash to Silverlight and gave some of his thoughts on Blend. One of components of Microsoft’s designer/developer workflow story is the “throw it over the wall” method between Blend and Visual Studio. They figure that designers will work in Blend and then coders will finish it in Visual Studio. As a result, there is no code editing in Blend and the XAML editor is pretty basic. Rick makes the point that Flash developers are pretty creative people who have been both building interfaces and coding for a long time. That workflow is tough for them to jump in to.

I love the Blend model and for large projects I think a very strict designer/deveoper workflow is important. But I also understand that I don’t know how you work and flexibility is key. That’s why I think people like Rick will like Thermo. We’re building Thermo on top of Flex Builder so you’re getting a powerful design tool with some coding features you’re used to behind the scenes. We’re doing a lot to hide the “Eclipseyness” so that designers will feel comfortable in the tool, but our code editor will have a lot of the same features that your regular copy of Flex Builder has. You’ll still need/want Flex Builder to take advantage of some of the more powerful profile and debugging features but if you’re a designer who wants to code or a coder who wants to design, I think you’ll find Thermo a really great tool for building RIAs.

[tags]Thermo, Devigner, Blend, Flex[/tags]

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  4. Can You Build an RIA Platform Without Designers?
  5. One Reason Why the "Devigner" Workflow is Important – Designer Shortage
  • Mark Andrews

    Well hurry up and get the Thermo on ;) I’m getting cold here :) But seriously…I can’t wait to get my grubby little mitts on Thermo. The demo looks amazing and will certainly be a tool a colleague of mine will use.
    People will probably already know I’m an Adobe Fan-boy, but there are real reasons behind this and it’s only been the past year that I’ve really become so into Adobe Software. Although I like to think of myself of quite a decent programmer, I always struggle with using a lot of IDEs and other tools. Notepad & compilers have been my friends of the past. Some of the “recent” tools that Adobe have released such as Flex Builder have really revolutionized the way I work and my opinions of using an IDE.
    *to be continued…*

  • Mark Andrews

    …In the past I’ve tried to stick with the older proven technologies, such as Delphi/PHP rather than going the .Net/Ruby way as I find the Microsoft (and other companies) tools are difficult to use, their documentation is full of complicated nonsense that explains how their solution will enable system admins to inventerovolutionize, yes I made that up, their lives.
    Recently I have had to dig deep into the livedocs and other documentation that Adobe has produced. This really is an amazing thing that serves me well every day. It feels like the documentation writers are inside my head and know exactly what I need.
    *to be continued…*

  • Mark Andrews

    Going back to the development tools. Flash has always had a bad reputation for being difficult to learn. Though I had an interesting job of teaching 10year old kids how to make stop frame animation/tweening. This was interesting and I know one child has now gone on to being a fulltime programmer/designer!
    I really feel Adobe knows the problems and wants to make things better. Thermo is the classic example of this, taking a problem “flex is hard for designers, and coders hate designing” and turning it into something very easy to use but also very powerful. I’ve had the same thing with the new iMovie, it’s so easy to use but can be very powerful.
    Thats enough ranting for now. We will now have a much clearer lineup of tools to use…
    *to be continues…*

  • Mark Andrews

    Photoshop – design of interface
    Thermo – make design into basic apps
    Flex Builder – make basic app more complex
    AIR – make apps go to the desktop

    This shows to me that Adobe are looking at the workflow and producing the tools that will allow any development situation to be covered. What most awesome is the way these tools link together, all using the same language/frameworks/file formats.
    Anyway, daily rant over. Hope it’s of use to some people.

    Mark x

  • http://danny-t.co.uk DannyT

    or to put it in one post… let us have look at it ;)

    i appreciate the adobe-show-em-early-get-em-excited approach, but c’mon let’s at least have a few unbiased opinions out here already.

  • http://fernando-comet.blogspot.com Fernando Comet

    Ok Ryan, do you know when will be available the beta version of Thermo?
    Thanks a lot!

  • Adam

    When I first took a look at Blend (the day the beta came out) my first question was “who’s going to use this?”. It seemed to ‘codey’ to interest designers (you wouldn’t want to have to use it instead of e.g illustrator) and not codey enough for devs (I can’t actually type a line of code). It seemed to me a way of knitting the two together, and perhaps thats a new role, but no-one I work with (design or dev) would want to just do that.

  • http://blog.jodybrewster.net Jody Brewster

    Ok, now I’m all ears. Dude, you all sound like you are so on the right track its not even funny. Keep us posted bro!

  • Pingback: designers Throwing things over the wall… « different things

  • http://www.acneayo.com shab

    well i’m not sure about that.

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Hey guys, sorry about the lack of response. It’s been a really weird week. Mark, thanks a lot for the thoughts. What’s been really cool for me is to see how the creative/developer dynamic plays out on the Thermo team. We’ve got people from the Flex team and people from XD and people from our creative suite working to make the product good.

    I don’t have any date on a release version for Thermo. I hate that I don’t have info for you. When I wasn’t working for Adobe it bugged me to hear about products and not have any idea when a beta is coming. Now that I’m on this side of the fence I understand a lot more why that is. Hopefully you guys won’t be too annoyed with me for blogging about some of the issues we’re talking about.