[IxDA Discuss] Adobe Thermo

[Jeff White]

"...but does
not, nor should it, provide you with magic UCD skills.  The same way
anyone with a copy of Photoshop can make a digital photo look pretty
and make them feel like a professional without having to read up on
what it takes to take professional photos."

Definitely. What I love is the thought of adding rich interactivity to my
mockups w/o the involvement of a developer. I have not been writing code for
about 7 months now, and I don't want to go back! I care less about code
quality and more about easily adding animation and motion w/o writing code.
But, the better code this thing churns, the more support it will get from
the engineers I work with everyday.

You're absolutely right of course, that better tools do not mean better
designs, but those with good design chops and UCD skills could very rapidly
create a working prototype, do some usability testing, incorporate changes
based on the tests, then deliver a working prototype that can be used as a
starting point for engineers to write production level code. In my
situation, it would also cut down on the amount of storyboarding, activity
diagrams and use cases I need to spend time on. That's pretty powerful
(especially for anyone trying to make Agile + UCD play nice), and will lead
to higher quality designs in my opinion, as long as it's used by experienced
designers and UCD practitioners. It's what I wanted MS' Expression Blend
(right name?) to be. I'm really excited about the potential around products
like this, and I hope Adobe delivers. Soon.

On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 14:37:06, pauric <radiorental at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For me, the killer feature for any designer orientated app in the
> toolchain is the ability to generate succinct legible code thats easy
> for a developer (or designer) to debug.
>
> >From the MacWorld article: "Designers using Thermo don%u2019t have
> to write code for their applications, but they can choose to view the
> source code and see it in a Flex Builder editor that they can work
> with if they want to"
>
> Making note of this ability a year out from release hints to me that
> this will be a key aspect of the app.
>
> Concern.. assuming there will be pattern libraries for such apps.
> This will enable more intuitive designers out of the closet but does
> not, nor should it, provide you with magic UCD skills.  The same way
> anyone with a copy of Photoshop can make a digital photo look pretty
> and make them feel like a professional without having to read up on
> what it takes to take professional photos.
>