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I’ve just read some pretty valid concerns over at EverythingFlex with regards to Thermo, announced yesterday at MAX. I thought I’d post my response on here…
At first I was also a little scared by this [tool]. But if you look at how it is at present, as Tink mentions there, you have to export layers out of Photoshop (which is a skill in itself unless your designer is ultra neat and doesn’t have a thousand layers with adjustments and masks). This means you are expecting your developers to be extremely savvy with Photoshop, luckily a lot of Flashers are, but that’s not always the case, particularly with Flex devs.
At the very least this tool takes some of that pain away, even if it is not a round trip processes, it should still help to provide assets that you might otherwise have had to spend a lot of your own time generating. As for generating the assets with code, that’s only possible in very few occaisions and it’s always a decision that has to be made on a per case basis. Sometimes it can really hinder a project to find you are creating a circle with code, when you need to then go apply a gradient to it, because what we then find is instead of giving a designer a structured FLA, it instead shifts the creative changes back on the Flash developers already busy role.
Anything that can reduce the cost of Flash and Flex projects gets my vote. Looking forward to giving Thermo a test run and seeing exactly what it ends up generating.
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As for designers being savvy about the layers and all, i think Thermo may just trigger a breed of specialized designers or design field. Designers who are more focused on designing UI. These designers would probably be able to tweak with codes for visual effects. Thermo would be ideal for these folks.
i also agree that more and more when working with complex RIAs with many stake holders involved, i'm seeing success and amazing productivity boosts when designers take the role of UI experts and coreography and developers do the coding. thanks to flex Builder/MXML-code-behind approach, these UI guys and girls are going as fas as jumping straight into flex builder and the plethora of the UI util tools such as style explorers etc to layout and customize the UI, skins, css styles etc and then pass it on to application developers, coders and architects. but of course you have to strike a balance between all this and sometimes doing some programmatic skinning as a developer. as mentioned above thermo will only boost productivity when there's a clear separation of concerns among developers, designers, UI specialists and architects. this approach is nothing new and has been advocated for a decade or so. in my view, tools such as flash, as well as doing some great things for us folks coming from a multimedia background, it did only increase the amount of "jack of all trades" type of designer/developers. thermo/flex and RIAs might succeed in separating these concerns, bringing back specialists again.