What is Adobe Thermo? - Answer: Designer/Developer Integration
Notes taken from the keynote at MAX:
- an RIA design tool
- allows designers to create rich internet applications with logic embedded
- allows them to wire up interactivity without working any code
- allows them to use dynamic data without having access to the data source
- seamless workflow for developers working with flex builder
- can access Flex source code for the design
- taking a layered image from photoshop, and importing the psd file into Thermo generates layout and code for that layout.
- converting artwork to components on the fly (wow, very cool)
- they take a rectangle graphic, right click, convert to a TextInput component, and it retained the text within the graphic (made default text of TextInput component), all style information on the graphic is transferred to component (including font styles)
- highlight multiple graphical elements, and converted the group to a list, and creates a design time data set with the selected images to power the list
- changed padding on list items, and an onion skin of original image placement was retained for reference but just with reduced opacity
- edited an item in the list in place, and added an event to it to go to a new state, applied a transition to the state change. The state change was a size change, and was able to preview the increase in size, with the transition effect applied. Added some text information underneath the new state, which had fade effects applied to it. Was able to stagger effect play times using a simple gantt chart type tool.
- automatically provides lorem ipsum text for testing, and can define the number of words to show for it.
- takes two selected rectangle and converts to a scrollbar instance (seriously?... no way...) Able to identify the different layers of the graphic selection as the different components of a scrollbar. Associates the new scrollbar with the list using a wiring handle to simply drag over the list that it should affect, binding the two components together.
- able to easily add new items to the design time data collection
- and it all just works... amazing... bring on the applause :-)
- thermo and flexbuilder share the same project format, meaning designers and developers can very easily collaborate during development cycle.
- can expect early alpha/beta next year (2008).
I'm not convinced about designer/developer "integration", as much as just cutting the developer out of the equation. Or, should I say, drastically reducing their corporate footprint. If a designer, a business analyst and a client (internal or external) can define the interface, the data, the validation and the workflow, what's left for the developer to do? That role may well be reduced to that of a data architect - plugging in real live data to the application.
I don't want to sound like a broken record - we found out that corporate america's attempt to marginalize the developer role was a pipe dream, but they did change the role. That was the legacy of the dot-bomb/outsourcing period not too long ago.
I think this is going to change the role dramatically also, not for the reasons above, but because business users prefer to work this way. A picture paints a thousand words, seeing is believing, etc, etc.
Cheers,
David
I think you are wrong, and I think there is a great need for an application like Thermo. I am a designer that works with a team of developers building a flex application. I can say as a designer it is currently is extremely difficult and time consuming to create mockups for our app. Unlike a web page that is usually text and image based, our flex app displays tons of data, I can not even begin to tell you how time consuming it is to create dummy data in an app like Fireworks, or Photoshop. And I can't count how many times our team built the functionality wrong because I was unable to quickly demonstrate user action (i.e. view states). Being able to hook up dummy data in a designer friendly environment will be nothing less than a dream come true for a person like myself.
In addition to the comp process, Flex is not the most designer friendly app. Yes Flex 3 has some improvements but not enough to get excited about. I think most Adobe presentations get it wrong when they offer designer templates for their design apps, this approach leads to a graphic heavy (long load time) interface that becomes much more difficult to white label and make adjustments, the beauty of flex is that it uses the flash engine and its native graphical format is vector based. Because of the many inconsistencies between all the adobe handling of vector images (especially Flash), and because simple stuff like applying gradients often are not as easy as just grabbing the rgb values, it will be extremely beneficial to be able to do some of the styling in a designer friendly flex authoring tool. In addition if Adobe take an idea or two from Dreamweaver and someday offer a split code and WYSIWG window,it might just become a little bit easier for us designers to figure out what goes on behind the scene, this will be good for everyone. The css in Flex is just different enough from html css to drive you nuts. As a designer with tons of html, and css experience a tool like this will be invaluable for me, but there is no way in hell that Thermo will ever take the developer out of the equation when it comes to building a flex app.
I rely soooooo heavily on our developers, I wouldn't even begin to think that someday I would be able to do even half of what they do with Thermo. On the contrary, I think in many ways the Adobe team did such a good job with the default skins that it made it so that developers have been able to enter my world and produce pretty decent apps without the use of a designer, but do we really need another gray flex app? I really believe that Adobe is exactly on track with this idea, in order to let developers make the awesome apps that also are appealing and have great usability, they must include an app that makes it more accessible to designers to participate. Viola! Thermo.
Then after or maybe at the same time as Thermo they can fix the lame lame lame lame drawing tools in Flash so that we can create 12 X 12 and 16X 16 icons in a swf format. Or better yet standardize the vector tools between all their apps so I can export my icons from Fireworks and know that they will look exactly like I created them once they embedded swf icons in our flex app.
Christian
Do we still disagree?
Cheers,
Davo