Behold Adobe “Thermo”… And I thought Flex was cool !

If you — like me — were amazed by the Flex tooling to create Rich Internet Applications, wait until you get your hands on Thermo !

Thermo is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. It allows designers using familiar tools to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.

Thermo is targetting the designers. Typically, they don’t (need to) know any programming language, but are true wizards in Photoshop. One of the amazing features is the possibility to import a piece of Photoshop artwork and let Thermo convert it instantly into a Flex application !! As in Dreamweaver, you can switch to code view if you want…

Features

• Use drawing tools to create original graphics, wireframe an application design, or manipulate artwork imported from Adobe Creative Suite tools.
• Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a “skin”.
• Define and wire up interactive behavior, such as what to do when a user clicks on something, without having to write code.
• Easily design UIs that work with dynamic data, such as a list of contacts or product information, without having access to the actual data source. Design-time sample data can be used as a realistic placeholder when laying out an application, testing interactivity, and choreographing motion.

Applications created in Thermo are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers. The designer’s work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.

Video of the keynote at MAX

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

More info:

• http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo
• http://aralbalkan.com/1050