Victor sent me this unofficial sneak peak presentation of Adobe Thermo presented at the MAX 2007 conference in Chicago:

Be sure to also check out parts II and III of the video. What’s truly ground-breaking about this new app is how it allows for transforming what were just layers and objects in Photoshop (and possibly other apps – they only used Photoshop in the demo) into actual functioning interface elements on a web page. In other words, rather than being stuck with whatever ui theme that the framework you are using supports, you can just draw the components and then tell Thermo what part of your drawing should have what functionality. In other words, I can turn a text layer in Photoshop into a text field, or two rectangles into a scroll bar. All of this is functioning within Flex, meaning that Photoshop files effectively are being converted into MXML. Rather than requiring developers to recreate all the designer’s efforts, they can now instead allow the designer to bring their work into their framework, and even continue their design work, prototyping behaviors (Thermo has a bunch of cool prototyping features built in, such as easily being able to add sample content) and exploring interactive versions of the formerly static Photoshop files.

In some ways, I am incredibly excited about Thermo, and can’t wait for the public release. But the devil will, as they say, be in the details, and that couldn’t be more true for an application as complex and powerful as this. The demo looks fantastic, but so did a demo of iRise, which I saw years ago, only to discover that the real application fell far short of its promises. Of course, Thermo goes far beyond iRise (after all, iRise is an application simulator, while Thermo in fact is intended to allow for creating real apps), and is many ways a much smarter model, particularly the use of MXML, which allows for much more control and portability.

So, for now, I’m definitely excited about this tool, but only cautiously so.

I think the actual release of Adobe CS3 is still a couple weeks away [actually, just received an email from Adobe that it's shipping now], but I’m already reading up on every last tidbit about this great new application framework. As a UX designer, one of my main focuses has been on Fireworks CS3, which has added at least two features that I think will make it a very popular rapid prototyping tool.

First, they’ve added multiple pages and master pages. That was one the biggest let-downs with previous versions – even if you did a quick design mockup of a single page, propagating that across multiple pages was a pain in the #@*$! (and one of many reasons I chose to not use FW for prototyping.) Now you can quickly create a mini-site with common elements on one page.

The other great new feature is smart symbols, which use something called 9-piece slices (?), which basically means that you can resize them without distorting them. This is a critical feature when working with UI widgets, since you often want to, say, make a text field wider. And better yet, the app allows for creating your own custom symbols with these properties. This really sets FW CS3 apart from a lot of other prototyping tools, who often have a fixed library of UI widgets. I think there was a time when UI widgets were reasonably stable – as in, you basically had Windows, Mac, and *nix widgets, but all that has changed with the Web itself becoming a platform. Take for example the reply feature in Gmail…

This isn’t exactly a standard widget. Sure, you could probably re-create the functionality represented here with a vanilla drop-down, but it would just not have the same elegant feel. With FW CS3, you could basically draw whatever kind of element you want and then turn it into a Smart Symbol, i.e. a widget in the UXD world.

Btw, I think it’s starting to sound like a traveling salesman for Adobe (but wait, there’s more!) – I’m not – it’s just that I’ve been waiting so long for something like this and all the other tools that seem to do what FW CS3 claims to do have turned out to be duds. Of course, this app could be a dud as well, but I have a good feeling that it won’t be – keeping my fingers crossed…

So I’m currently watching the live webcast of the Adobe CS3 launch – the most exciting part so far, from the perspective of a User Experience is about the focus on prototyping – in other words, integrating features into the tool that are specifically intended for presenting unfinished work to clients. Until now, major apps like Photoshop and Dreamweaver are all about creating the finished product. While that’s all good and well, the reality is of course that to get to that final deliverable, you need to iterate through a series of increasingly refined concepts. For me, this is potentially super-exciting, since I’ve already been hacking ways of presenting work in progress for clients with these tools, and will now have tools that were actually designed for this(!) For example, you’ll be able to insert sketches of designs and then add hotspots to them to be able to click through the various sketched pages with a user or a client. That’s of course not too amazing (and there are agile tools out there that already support it), but apparently, from what I could glean, this is all integrated into a workflow in which you iterate into your final design. In other words, Adobe is recognizing UXD as part of the production process and integrating it into their tools – but I’m going to want to play around with an actual tool until I uncork the champagne….