Didn’t have much time to post anything yesterday, but I had to post up some first hand info about Thermo that Steve Heinz “sneak-peeked” on Monday.
I was at the Adobe UK Boot Camp, organized to coincide with the launch of Flex 3 and AIR and Steve Heinz (Senior Product Manager for Thermo) and a couple of other guys from the Thermo team were there too. As well as Andrew Shorten (Adobe Platform Evangelist)
So after we had the keynote, given by Steve, and various presentations on AIR, Flex 3 (including one by yours truly) and FMS, Steve took the stage once more and gave us all a live demonstration of the latest version of Thermo (which was a pretty big deal as only a handful – and I mean handful of people are allowed to demo it at this point in time).
So how is it looking?
It still looks similar to the demos that were given at Max. However we did get to see some of the drawing tools that are now in it. Plus it is definitely build on eclipse, so this will hopefully give rise to both a stand alone version and / or an additional / replacement for the design view that we have in the current versions of Flex Builder
As with all other information out in the public domain surrounding Thermo, there still doesn’t seem to be a resounding “yes” that this will finally form a single product, or whether it will be combined / integrated with other tools to provide this functionality across the designer / developer workflow.
UI wise it still looks a bit wishy-washy. I would suspect this is because they are working on functionality and look and feel will be incorporated as they progress. The current UI looks very “Flex-like”, which isn’t a really bad thing, but it has been observed that some people feel it either needs to look like an OS / eclipse native tool or be something radically different a la Lightroom and the new UI’s that have been applied tot the Production Studio tools like Premier. We will just have to wait and see on that one…
What components will I be able to use with Thermo?
Now this was one of the really cool bits of the demonstration. While Thermo currently only supports a subset of the Flex UI components (for testing purposes I suspect). The plan is to support custom made components as well as the core feature set. While no definite plans were given as to how this was to be achieved it did seem likely that some form of metatag / properties would need to be exposed by the custom components indicating what visual elements form the component itself and would be required to create it via Thermo.
So where are the pictures?
Well to be honest, this was a fairly lo-key event and as no-one else was taking photos I didn’t think it would be polite to whip out my camera and start taking snaps… I know, my bad (curse you good upbringing!). I do have some photos of the schwag they were giving out so I will upload and post about those later on.
And Finally
Big thanks to Robin, Andrew, Steve and the rest of the Thermo guys and especially Adobe for putting on a great day (and the free copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional was a great surprise for all who attended).
I guess my first thoughts on seeing it at LFPUG last week were that it looks like the ‘missing design view’ of Flex Builder. I didn’t realise it was built upon eclipse, so hearing that is great. However it was pretty firmly presented as ‘aimed at the designer’. I think they do need to consider that developers are going to be needing it too. Not all designers will wish to spend their time working or tweaking implementation despite the increased ease Thermo presents. As a developer, I find I need to equip myself with most of the tools a designer has, in order to avoid time consuming round-trips when a tweak is required within the creative. Expensive business with a lots spent on some tools only occasionally used! I’m therefore thinking developers who’s invested loads into Adobe tools really deserve this properly integrated into builder and designers if they think they need it, should perhaps buy it as a tool ? ;-) Of course for less than it would cost for them to buy Builder.
@creacog The eclipse bit surprised me and I’m not sure if it will end up as an eclipse app. I just happened to spot the “Eclipse” entry in the OS X menu bar as Thermo was closed down, the same way Flex Builder displays it as it goes through the final shut down / clean up routine.
You’re right though it does make sense to have it as both standalone and as the actual design view for FB, we can only wait and see what eventually happens :p
I know where you’re coming from with the amount of apps you need to have on your machine these days. Thank God hard disk space is so cheap LOL!
Thanks for the link to the LFPUG presentation on Thermo Tink.