In my pre-Adobe job, I lost countless hours turning complex Photoshop PSD files into something ready to animate in Flash. In fact, the pain of that process is largely what drove me to work at Adobe, trying to devise something more efficient. Flash CS3 marks a giant step forward in its ability to suck in PSDs & turn them into layers and symbols. That’s great, but what if you’re a designer working with Adobe Flex to build rich Internet apps? The hand-off right now isn’t so seamless.<\/p>\n
The need to turn designs into interactive apps quickly is what’s driving development of a new Adobe application code-named “Thermo” and sneak-peeked at Adobe MAX. To borrow Sean Corfield’s nice summary<\/a>:<\/p>\n The much anticipated “Thermo” was next. As expected, this is a designer-focused application for creating Flex applications. Starting with a Photoshop PSD file, Thermo imported this and converted it to MXML. Design elements can then be selected and with a simple right-click they can be converted from artwork to Flex controls<\/u>. The automatic inference of design-time data sets so you could test UI interactions with “real” data was very impressive. You really cannot appreciate the impact this had on the audience – it drew a huge amount of applause and loud cheers!<\/em> [Via<\/a>] <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n To see the tool in action, check out Aral Balkan’s videos & notes<\/a> from the keynote. <\/p>\n\n