Back at MAX I raved about Thermo, a new product being developed by Adobe. It basically allows designers to create Flex mockups/prototypes that actually have some dynamic power to them. It really blew me away (and made me wish, once again, I was doing more Flex work). Adobe Edge's newsletter has a video on Thermo so you can see it in action:
The Edge is actually a pretty cool newsletter. I keep forgetting to check it out. If you haven't seen it before you should spend some time checking it out.
Archived Comments
This stuff is interesting. I am excited to hear about people who start to use this stuff in the real world. I am curious to know if this saves a lot of time for the overall development process, or if it is just for designers.
Meaning, they talk about programmers just going in and plugging in their logic or list of products... but does that mean that this application is going to export code to be used in Production?? Or this merely a prototyping app so that the client can really get a feel for the user experience; and, once signed off on, the original design files (without dynamic functionality) is handed off to someone to code XHTML and ColdFusion and all that goodness.
My only fear is that this will lead to more people creating lower quality code. I eagerly await some feedback from developers.
What follows is my IMPRESSION. I could be wrong.
What I saw at MAX was more than a prototype. I wouldn't call it production, but it was darn close. The code looked good as well.
My feeling is that Thermo does 2 things well:
a) Lets designers create more realistic prototypes.
b) Lets designers hand off to developers much more complete mockups. It lets the developers worry less about design crap (since the designer was able to export MXML) and focus more on business logic.
So while this is a designer tool, the developer in me is VERY happy to see this.
Ah, I think I missed a huge point. Is this only for MXML export? Or was this supposed to export XHTML as well (its hard to pay 100% attention to the video at work).
Just for MXML (afaik).
If I'm wrong, I plead bad intelligence.
Ok, that makes me much less nervous. That's a much more controlled environment.