At this morning's keynote at the Adobe MAX event in Chicago, Mark Anders and Steven Heintz of Adobe gave a sneak peek of a new application being developed by the company code-named "Thermo." Thermo is what they're terming a "rich internet application design tool." Its goal is to allow designers to create Flex-based RIAs without the need to touch any code and to create a more seamless workflow between designers and developers.
With Thermo, designers can build a web app UI and the MXML code to control it is automatically rendered by the application. Developers can then access that code and tie the UI to the rest of the application. Some conference attendees were rightly reminded of Visual Basic, but Thermo seems much smarter -- and, of course, is aimed at web app developers.
The demo at the conference was very compelling and drew the loudest applause of anything presented. Thermo has basic drawing tools that can be used to wireframe an app, but what really makes Thermo special for designers is that it understands Photoshop images and uses layer data to capture information about various UI elements (the application also plays nice with images from Illustrator and Fireworks). In their demonstration, Anders and Heintz imported a user interface mockup for a music browsing app. Thermo recognized the layer data from the PSD, allowing the duo to easily edit various elements inside the UI.
The presenters really got the MAX crowd rocking by showing off Thermo's "Convert artwork to..." feature. In a matter of a couple of clicks, a text input box on the UI went from static image to actual form field with the MXML code rendered automatically. Thermo even preserved styling of the form element from the PSD mockup.
The code view for Thermo is actually the full Flex Builder application, which means that it is a powerful development tool for programmers, as well. The idea is that developers can write underlying business logic for a Flex application while designers work on look and feel all from inside the same environment, and the process is as painless as possible for both sides.
Thermo was quickly the most buzzed about thing at the conference, and it was easy to see why. Anders and Heintz turned a static image of a web app interface into a working mockup -- complete with dummy lorem ipsum data created by Thermo -- in about 15 minutes without touching any code. Thermo allows designers to create interactive Flex-based applications without coding, then hand those apps off to programmers who can complete the development process by adding business logic.
Adobe expects to release an early version of Thermo sometime next year. For now they've set up a vague info page on the Adobe Labs site. When it drops, Thermo really could be a game changer that drops the barrier for entry into the web app market just that much more.
Note: Josh Catone is at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago, September 30 - October 3, courtesy of Adobe.
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Adobe gave a preview of their new RIA-Builder, Thermo, today at MAX. The live, onstage demo showed how to take a Photoshop-generated screenshot and transform it into an interactive Flex UI that can be edited in FlexBuilder. This new... Read More
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I had really hoped this is what Thermo would be when I wrote about it, the prediction comes true:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/smoothspan-nails-thermo/
What are the ramifications? It's a whole new kind of programming: the creating of graphical gadgets and other UI "knobs and buttons" made accessible to designers instead of just programmers. For what they do, it's like suddenly having a spreadsheet instead of an adding machine or a BASIC program.
Very cool!
Best,
BW
Posted by: Bob Warfield | October 2, 2007 3:53 PMFor anyone who wants to see the demo, Peter Elst got a recording: http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2007/10/02/adobe-max-chicago-thermo/
=Ryan
Posted by: Ryan Stewart | October 2, 2007 4:19 PMrstewart@adobe.com
I'd really like to understand how this is relevant to Web app developers. Are you saying that Thermo can publish to HTML/CSS/Javascript?
Posted by: Mark Baker | October 2, 2007 4:27 PMThis new Thermo interface reminds me my good old dream about Flash 2.0.
Really intrigued.
Posted by: Flash Teh Ripper | October 3, 2007 5:23 AM"Some conference attendees were rightly reminded of Visual Basic, but Thermo seems much smarter -- and, of course, is aimed at web app developers." Sounds like an outdated impression of VB to me... since 2001 the .NET platform has enabled this type of development with many different languages, and targeting Web applications as well.
Thermo looks like they are taking another page from Microsfot, who is quite a bit further down the road with their version of this technology. Their XML language to describe interfaces in a target-neutral way and to facilitate collaboration between artists and programmers is called XAMLA, rather than MXML. In turn Microsoft was inspired by XUL. The MS equivalent of Thermo for desktop and RIAs is called WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).
Posted by: Chase Saunders | October 3, 2007 10:26 AM@Saunders, correct. Flex, Thermo, whatever... are tools to easily make RIAs.
currently i see that MS has just posted runtimes (Silverlight, WPF) and SDKs. and we'll have to wait and see what MS have for tooling them. MS has better experience in creating developer tools i would say.
i hope things will be much more exciting for Flash and Silverlight in near future :)
// chall3ng3r //
Posted by: chall3ng3r | October 5, 2007 3:07 PMMicrosoft has the Expression suite of tools for Silverlight and WPF (Blend 2 for Silverlight is in beta). It uses XAML as a common "full-fidelity" format that enable developers and designers to participate in implementing a rich interactive application and user experience together. There's more info @ http://www.microsoft.com/expression/
Posted by: Ted Hu | October 5, 2007 3:22 PM