MAX 2007 Recaps — THERMO

October 29, 2007 by g.

MAX 2007 has been a big event, traveling to 3 cities with over 6,000 attendees in all.  (This week is the last stop, in Tokyo.)

I caught MAX 2007 in Chicago.

I have been going to MAX since the Macromedia days.  MAX 2006 was the first Adobe MAX and came only 10 months after the acquisition of Macromedia had closed.  At MAX 2006 many of the big preview announcements centered on the integration of former Macromedia Studio products into Creative Suite (Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Contribute).  With the successful shipping earlier this year of the amazing CS3 I was interested to see what new surprise announcements our good friends at Adobe might have in store for us this year.

As time permits it is my goal to blog about six announcements by Adobe at MAX that I found most interesting and/or exciting.

• Thermo
• SaaS (Software as a Service):  Share, Pacifica, CoCoMo, Photoshop Express, Buzzword, Scene7
• DRM in Video via FMRMS (Flash Media Rights Management Server)
• AMP (Adobe Media Player)
• Flash Player 10 (with advances for text and 3D)
• Acrobat with Flash Player

First up, Thermo …

THERMO

Thermo may have been Adobe’s best kept surprise announcement for MAX 2007.  Thermo is basically a Designer IDE for generating MXML.  Wow!  The announcement and demonstration of the Thermo prototype was amazing.  Thermo really boosts the Flex designer/developer workflow. 

Videos of the demo of Thermo at MAX 2007 Chicago is up on YouTube in three parts (thanks Aral):

• Part 1:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGdr3dCmxe4
• Part 2:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9IjZJ0D_bo
• Part 3:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsfOe_MCEbg

Following are two observations about Thermo.

AN MXML DESIGN TOOL BY THE BEST FOR THE BEST. 
Lightweight rich apps are the future.  It is a competitive world out there.  Adobe currently is dominant in the lightweight, rich app space and announcements like Thermo highlight brilliantly that Adobe is intent on not ceding any marketshare in this rapidly exploding space.  On the design side, my sense is that in the market for design software over 9 out of 10 designers choose products in the Creative Suite.  With CS3, Adobe added extensions in CS3 products to support design of MXML based applications (most notably extensions in Fireworks).  With Thermo Adobe is clearly applying its unparalled design expertise to bringing to market the best possible visual appplication design tool.  And as an FYI, one of the biggest Flex application design shops is none other than Adobe themselves (check back for my forthcoming post on SaaS).  So Thermo is an IDE Adobe is building both for the market and for themselves

MXML SYNTAX EVOLUTION. 
I am a Flex/Flash/ActionScript developer.  When the Thermo demo went into code view the tag syntax you see includes tags that are beyond those for the Flex Framework components (see in this recording at timecode 4:37:  http://youtube.com/watch?v=lGdr3dCmxe4).  WOW!  At MAX the presenters offered no discussion of the code syntax but clearly Adobe has in the works the articuation of new XML based schemas.  MXML offers a declarative, tag based syntax that serves as an alternative to code based ActionScript for instantiating the classes of the underlying Flex Framework.  So it appears Adobe is now creating additional classes and XML schemas. 
Note 1:  This new syntax has even made an appearance in the public Flex Bug and Issue Management System on an issue with the milestone "(Planning) SDK Post Moxie".  You can view the issue here: https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-12636
Note 2:  Although outside of Flex and MXML, even Flash CS3 has introduced a limited XML schema to support copy-and-paste for timeline animations in the form of the Motion XML Elements.  See docs here or demo here.

For more on Thermo, watch the following placeholder page on labs:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo

Also Julie Campagna, who manages the Adobe Edge newsletter, will be recording a demo about Thermo soon (per comment here).

Posted in Flex | No Comments »