02 October 2007

My Thoughts on Adobe Thermo

Written by Richard Leggett ( )
Published on October 2nd, 2007 @ 07:51:37 pm, using 271 words, 1184 views

Categories: Flash, Flex, AIR/Apollo, Conferences

I’ve just read some pretty valid concerns over at EverythingFlex with regards to Thermo, announced yesterday at MAX. I thought I’d post my response on here…

At first I was also a little scared by this [tool]. But if you look at how it is at present, as Tink mentions there, you have to export layers out of Photoshop (which is a skill in itself unless your designer is ultra neat and doesn’t have a thousand layers with adjustments and masks). This means you are expecting your developers to be extremely savvy with Photoshop, luckily a lot of Flashers are, but that’s not always the case, particularly with Flex devs.

At the very least this tool takes some of that pain away, even if it is not a round trip processes, it should still help to provide assets that you might otherwise have had to spend a lot of your own time generating. As for generating the assets with code, that’s only possible in very few occaisions and it’s always a decision that has to be made on a per case basis. Sometimes it can really hinder a project to find you are creating a circle with code, when you need to then go apply a gradient to it, because what we then find is instead of giving a designer a structured FLA, it instead shifts the creative changes back on the Flash developers already busy role.

Anything that can reduce the cost of Flash and Flex projects gets my vote. Looking forward to giving Thermo a test run and seeing exactly what it ends up generating.

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Comment from: Ronnie

Agreed with you on this. If it streamlines the production process, it is definitely worth looking into.

As for designers being savvy about the layers and all, i think Thermo may just trigger a breed of specialized designers or design field. Designers who are more focused on designing UI. These designers would probably be able to tweak with codes for visual effects. Thermo would be ideal for these folks.

Permalink 02/10/07 @ 21:58

Comment from: Johan

hi Rich, great topics in here as always :-)!

i also agree that more and more when working with complex RIAs with many stake holders involved, i'm seeing success and amazing productivity boosts when designers take the role of UI experts and coreography and developers do the coding. thanks to flex Builder/MXML-code-behind approach, these UI guys and girls are going as fas as jumping straight into flex builder and the plethora of the UI util tools such as style explorers etc to layout and customize the UI, skins, css styles etc and then pass it on to application developers, coders and architects. but of course you have to strike a balance between all this and sometimes doing some programmatic skinning as a developer. as mentioned above thermo will only boost productivity when there's a clear separation of concerns among developers, designers, UI specialists and architects. this approach is nothing new and has been advocated for a decade or so. in my view, tools such as flash, as well as doing some great things for us folks coming from a multimedia background, it did only increase the amount of "jack of all trades" type of designer/developers. thermo/flex and RIAs might succeed in separating these concerns, bringing back specialists again.

Permalink 04/10/07 @ 01:04

Comment from: lee probert

I've never met a designer that's prepared assets properly. I can see this just being another step in the development process except we'll need to tidy up the PSD's BEFORE we output the assets. Sceptical as ever but if it means a new breed of 'uber-designer' then I'll be happy to work with them.

Permalink 09/10/07 @ 05:39

Comment from: Symbian

This is stolen directly from MS. Check out XAML and Blend. Still it's a good idea.

Permalink 16/10/07 @ 01:55

Comment from: Richard Leggett [Member]

I was wondering if anyone would draw the parallel. I've used XAML and Blend extensively. I think it's too early to see how similar these products are. Having said this, Blend is an incredible tool for modifying existing component styles, a very different approach to using CSS, and allows for a lot more control with the cost being an increased reliance on the tool itself over hand-cranking.

Permalink 16/10/07 @ 02:07

Comment from: Jason

Stolen from MS? Really?? Awww the irony...

Permalink 19/10/07 @ 21:08

Comment from: Richard Leggett [Member]

I think there's some confusion here. It's not possible to "steal" this. Whilst it is the case that Thermo (from the given information) is a tool to help create styles/skins, layouts and transitions for components in Flex, and Blend is a tool to help create styles/skins/templates layouts and transitions for components in WPF and Silverlight. All they are aiming on doing is making it easier to customise and use the existing framework elements in both render-tiers, how they do is completely different. They both improve alternative existing workflows, they don't add extra features. To give an analogy... when Character Studio came out for 3DS MAX with the aim on making it easier to animate characters in 3D Studio, nobody claimed that they were stealing "character animation" from anyone else.

Permalink 19/10/07 @ 21:31

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