ScaleNine

Everyone is getting excited as more details come out about Thermo. I’m sure the number of email requests to get on the “super pre-alpha” have flooded Adobe inboxes. The reason is that Thermo is looking to solve a huge gap in designer/developer workflow. This gap exists across pretty much every development workflow in various shapes and sizes, so it’ll be interesting to see what Adobe comes up with.

Thermo looks like a great tool, but it’s only half the story. The other part of the story (a big part) is what Flex 4 (Gumbo) is doing to make all the things in Thermo possible. You know, the code that’s generated behind the scenes as a designer is turns artwork into a working interface, adds transitions, etc. There’s a lot of work being done on Flex 4 to make Thermo look good, but each component, Flex 4 and Thermo, is vitally important.

If you were at last year’s MAX and saw Ely Greenfield’s presentation on “the flex roadmap”, then you probably know what I’m talking about. After MAX I tried to explain to people what I saw in his presentation, but it usually just wouldn’t come across. Now, on Adobe TV there’s a video of exactly what Ely was talking about. In the video he changes the way a component looks and acts all in a skin file. I assume this would be done by designer’s in Thermo so they don’t have to touch any code. This is also the same presentation that inspired Ben Stucki to create OpenFlux.

I showed this video to another developer and he asked, “Well, what will there be left for me to do? Create data and clean up Thermo code?” To him, making custom components was the fun part and now it seems part of that responsibility is falling on designers in Flex 4. The thing is, you can’t do everything with Thermo and Flex 4 out of the box, like turn a List into a spinning globe. I think things will definitely change to allow designers to have more control, but developers will now be freed up to do even more innovative things.

Things are definitely going to get interesting. Check out the video here.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 10:18 am and is filed under flex 4, thermo, workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.