Adobe Thermo

Posted byJimmy Lin 2 Comments on Adobe Thermo

At its Max developer conference, Adobe gave a sneak preview of a new tool code-named Thermo that allows designers to create the front end to Flash-based rich Internet applications without writing code. For example, you can import a layered Photoshop image and convert parts of the image to real UI controls. You can also create dummy data so that you can test out your design without needing the database code to be finished.

Someone posted videos of the Thermo demo on YouTube. I highly recommend watching them; the demo is one of the most impressive I’ve seen, especially in the end-user programming area.

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2 Comments

  1. Fogarty, Forlizzi, and Hudson had something similar to this a while back, though I don’t know enough about Thermo or their work to say what is the same and what is different.

    http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/571985.571995

    In order to create and use rich custom appearances, designers are often forced to introduce an unnatural gap into the design process. For example, a designer creating a skin for a music player must separately specify the appearance of the elements in the music player skin and the mapping between these visual elements and the functionality provided by the music player. This gap between appearance and semantic meaning creates a number of problems. We present a set of techniques that allows designers to use their preferred drawing tool to specify both appearance and semantic meaning. We demonstrate our techniques in an unmodified version of Adobe Photoshop®, but our techniques are general and adaptable to nearly any layered drawing package.

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  2. I also immediately thought of Fogarty et al’s system, called SLICE. The main difference I found is that with SLICE, designers specify everything (behavior, semantics, etc.) within Photoshop. With Adobe’s tools, a designer imports a Photoshop file into Thermo, and then specifies the behavior and semantics in that tool.

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