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

I’ve done it! Ive broken into the world of Flash blogging :).

One on my goals for 2007 was to start a blog, but I never did have the time to build what I’d visioned. I wanted to build my own custom Rails CMS and then front it in glorious ActionScript, but alas I never did have the spare time and motivation happen together. So for now, I’ve defaulted to WordPress and borrowed this basic theme. I’m sure though as the weeks and months progress, this shall start to change (well, I hope).

So, what can you expect from this new blog? Well, let me start by giving a brief overview of my background. I am proficient in most areas of Flash, I have been using Flash since Flash 4 and today my strongest area of Flash is AS3 and my weakest is the Flex Framework. (Don’t get me wrong, I know the basics and methodologies of Flex, I just haven’t found a reason for using it yet.)

I used work for a company called Sparkart (based in Emeryville, CA) where I created Flash websites/widgets for the music industry for big brands such as Linkin Park, The Killers, Eminem and Tim McGraw. And now I create Flash application (prototype) UIs at Sony (San Francisco, CA) supporting C middleware development.

I can’t imagine a life without Flash

I’m planning to post experiments, original tips, comment on platform news & developments and anything I feel relevant. So please keep on visiting and please please leave me comments!