Tue 2 Oct 2007
We’ve finally taken the wraps off Thermo–yay! We just showed a demo at the MAX day 2 keynote, and it went great. For those not at MAX, we’ve posted some info and screenshots on Adobe Labs.
I’ll post more thoughts on Thermo soon, but for now I need to grab lunch and go talk to customers at the Flex booth. Stop by if you’re here!
digg this | 
del.icio.us | 12 Comments
Hi …
any planned date for release thermo or still too early to talk about the date?
It’ll be interesting to see what this product can do in real world situations. Looks ideal for prototypes as is the PSD import feature in Flash, but I have my reservations about it being a full solution (based on the very limited info i’ve seen).
I’ll keeping my ears pricked for any other info.
@Saeed: It is still a little early, but we will have something people can experiment with sometime next year.
@Tink: We\’re definitely interested in hearing people\’s concerns–please feel free to post a comment with any more detailed thoughts you have. Thanks!
It’s pretty difficult to give any detailed thoughts without any detailed demos etc. and I’m sure more will be revealed in time.
From watching the videos it sounds like your aligning the tool for designers to prototype, which seems feasable. From the code it created I’d probably want to re-write that stuff as a dev and try and keep everything as clean as poss (i.e. when I create custom skins at the moment I create them in a seperate class). It also looked like flat colors or gradients which would have a much smaller footprint as code were created as bitmaps which isn’t great. I’m really not sure how you would take an image, and decide whether it would be code or not (i.e. the Halo skins are code, but I imagine it would be pretty impossible to have a bitmap of the Halo theme and re-write it in code.
One thing that did stand out for me in the demo was that styles weren’t mentioned. We would write skins for our apps at the mo, and then assign style to everything, so although as in the demo the scrollbar my only be a track and thumb, we would be able to change the colors etc using CSS.
@Tink — yes, you\’re definitely right that designers and developers still have to make the choice between vectors vs. bitmaps, making tradeoffs for file size, fidelity, memory/runtime performance, etc.
One of the things we\’re doing is making it so that if you import vectors from AI/PS/FW, or draw vectors directly within Thermo, those vectors are directly represented as MXML tags, instead of being opaque SWFs. So if the designer started with vectors, you don\’t have to recode them as AS–you can just take the MXML graphics.
You can then make those graphics styleable by simple data binding–for example, you could make the color of a stroke, a fill gradient endpoint, or a roundrect corner radius be data-bound to a style parameter. Our goal is that you really could build something as flexible as Halo (or even more flexible!) using MXML graphics tags and data binding.
Hope that helps–please feel free to send more thoughts as you have them. Thanks!
In the demo video posted by Peter Elst the generated sourcecode looks very explicit plus it is all in MXML. What are the plans for refactoring certain parts of the Thermo-created UI into components (MXML or AS3)? Will Thermo offer such a workflows or will this be up to the developer?
@Dirk: We will definitely support refactoring skins and custom components into separate files. For example, we didn’t show the code for this in the demo, but when we created the list from the individual CD cover images, Thermo automatically created a separate file for the item renderer–so even though it looks to the designer like s/he is editing it in place, it’s actually editing the code in a separate file. We’ll also have options for creating skins in external CSS/MXML graphics files as opposed to inline.
mmm will thermo targeting flash player 10 or 9 in it’s first version?
@Saeed: Unfortunately, we’re not ready to answer that right now. Sorry!
nj, I’m thinking about the comfort of Thermo workflow to the army of Flash Designers who are already familiar with the Flash IDE design features. I wrote a comment on this topic at the Ryan Stewart’s blog thermo-post, so let me link to it directly to not make the cross-post: why I think Thermo should be the brother of Flash.
And I’m gonna wrote more about it 🙂
Any more up to date info? Beta? Release?
Hi There,
Any word yet on when a public beta will be available for us to tinker with? Especially we need to evaluate Thermo versus Microsoft’s Expression tools. Thanks.