The second day MAX Chicago keynote just revealed "Thermo", an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.

Features

• Use drawing tools to create original graphics, wireframe an application design, or manipulate artwork imported from Adobe Creative Suite tools.
• Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a “skin”.
• Define and wire up interactive behavior, such as what to do when a user clicks on something, without having to write code.
• Easily design UIs that work with dynamic data, such as a list of contacts or product information, without having access to the actual data source. Design-time sample data can be used as a realistic placeholder when laying out an application, testing interactivity, and choreographing motion.

Applications created in Thermo are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers. The designer's work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.

More info & screenshots: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo

::: Are you ready for a creative power? ::: : : .

[Mike]

Very impressive.

Aral has been taking footage of the sneak peek of Thermo at MAX. Worth a watch.

http://aralbalkan.com/1050

[Renjamin]

This seems like a heaven for us designers who are working closely with devs.

They don't have a release date anywhere, but it seems these are just early stages in the production.

Definitely worth checking out!
Bookmarked!

[wraevn]

Or us designers who are also the devs!

[Anik]

very interesting, i dont see myself using it much, but iam sure it will make things a lot easier for designers and developers.

[pcMan]

I can't wait to test this new product. There's a new age on the RIA's development. I just can say WOW!!!!

[coldFUSED]

Yeh I am not sure about this one. First thing that comes to mind is "Adobe Go-Live". I smell about 6 pounds of $hit.

Why 6 pounds you ask? Take the code created from an Adobe Go-Live website, print it out, you have six pounds of dead tree. Did I mention all of that was for a image rollover?

[mindtwitch]

Yeah bloated code and/or code that was hard to modify would ruin this but from what it looks like it really isn't doing a lot of business logic, looks like it is mostly just the MXML and some simple actions.

I think this has potential for being a great tool, even for just being able to creating working comps for client review fairly quickly. You could even tweak things pretty easily during a client meeting.

Good point was brought up on AralBalkan about what happens if you update the PSD file. Might be too early in development to know but I would hope that with it running on PS layers, you could update the layer and it would update the "Thermo" interface, leaving all assigned actions etc. intact.

Can't wait for the release of this one and take it for a test drive.

Adobe has some really interesting stuff going on right now as far as software and technologies. I think by this time next year a lot of amazing stuff is going to come out of it in terms of integrating PDF, Flash, Video and a lot more. I'm envisioning Microsoft SharePoint on steroids. At least that is how it seems Adobe is positioning themselves at the moment.

[njadbe]

@coldFUSED: We definitely hear you One of our main concerns is to make sure that the code Thermo creates works for developers. I used to work on HTML authoring tools, so I'm pretty familiar with the difficulty of clean code generation. One thing that makes it more tractable for us is that unlike HTML, we control the language and framework.

On that note, Ely Greenfield, the Flex architect, gave a great talk at MAX discussing some of the ways we're planning to refactor the Flex framework to make skinning much more flexible. By having a cleaner separation between the presentation and the underlying controller logic and data for each component, we can actually make it so the designer can really own the design of the presentational aspects without affecting the code the developer needs to work on.

Thanks,

nj
Adobe Flex team

[coldFUSED]

Sorry to be so hard but I lived Go-Live code for a few years (6 years ago now) at the company I work for until we migrated everything out and it wasn't fun.

Glad to hear you guys are making a conscious effort to keep it clean.

Also glad to see you guys on our board and chiming in on discussions.

Thanks and good luck with Thermo.

[Codemonkey]

Originally posted by njadbe
By having a cleaner separation between the presentation and the underlying controller logic and data for each component, we can actually make it so the designer can really own the design of the presentational aspects without affecting the code the developer needs to work on.

Now that is music to my ears.

[Renjamin]

Originally posted by Codemonkey
Now that is music to my ears.

I can hear the music too man!

[princeratt]

Seems Nice Software to make life easy for Developers and designers.