Adobe Thermo: Building Flex's RIAs Gets Easy

Adobe gave a preview of their new RIA-Builder, Thermo, today at MAX. The live, onstage demo showed how to take a Photoshop-generated screenshot and transform it into an interactive Flex UI that can be edited in FlexBuilder. This new tool is aimed at designers and will be out in 2008.

There is no official page up, but there is a single page detailing Thermo on the Adobe Labs Wiki. They provide the following details:

• 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.

I've been at MAX since Sunday when I did an Ignite. I've been impressed at all the excitement from the developers and designers in attendance. The new tools that are being previewed and released seem to be living up to their expectations. After the jump I've included some screenshots from the wiki. Also see WebWare and ReadWriteWeb for more coverage.

[found the thermo link via Ryan Stewart's Twitter]

Adding text to an application

Pulling font information from the Photoshop file.