The Back Button

There is talk in the town of a new Adobe product codenamed “Thermo“. The first thing that comes to mind is a UK sit-com called “My Hero” featuring ThermoMan, but i’m nearly 99% sure it holds no connection. So what could it be?

The way I see it, Flash platform today has two main IDE’s; the first is Flash Pro and the second is Flex. Lets sum up these two IDEs:

Flash Pro - I see it as being a relic in todays world of application development. It’s far more suited to animation, which of course, is the origins of Flash remember?! It’s great for creative people to produce great looking visuals, but not so great for creating applications. Especially now you need to know AS3 which, most designers will find daunting.

Flex Bulder - Rapid application development using the Flex Framework that is not famous for it’s visual creativity. It’s the best AS3 editor/compiler IMO, that’s why I use FB2 currently to code all my projects. IMO, I think Flex is as exciting as visiting a box factory. Don’t get me wrong, boxes are extremely useful :).

It is amazingly obvious that there’s a gaping hole here; there’s no IDE for creatives to produce visually pleasing Flash applications. So what’s the solution? Well my guess is that “Thermo” will be the solution. So what will “Thermo” be? Well my prediction is that it shall be somewhere in the middle of After Effects/Apple Motion (remember that Flash 10 may be hardware accelerated), Flash Pro, Apple Automator and Flex. I think that “Thermo” shall be very drag-drop/WYSIWYG orientated (think After Effects/Apple Motion) and shall only require minimal “coding” (think Apple Automator or Scratch). Also, I think that all the workflows/effects and motions connected to these features shall be be sharable and Adobe will host them all freely.

This is my prediction for Thermo, let’s wait and see what happens next week