Designer's Toolbelt: Thermo
The most exciting thing I saw at Interaction 08 was a demo of Thermo, Adobe’s upcoming user interface prototyping tool. Narciso Jaramillo, a senior computer scientist with Adobe, took some time to show me what they’ve been up to. Not long ago, I wrote about Axure and how it doesn’t fit my needs. Thermo is exactly what I need.
Thermo will allow you to open a file from Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks with all layers intact. You can then select elements of your design and turn them into UI widgets and data. So, for example, you can select the graphical representation of a text field, and turn it into an interactive text field. Or, you can select the various pieces of a scroll bar, and with a few clicks, turn them into a working scroll bar that moves other elements on the screen. There is no scripting necessary.
The application makes it simple to specify dummy data to populate your prototype. It includes its own set of drawing tools for those who want to use it for wireframing, similar to Axure. It includes a library where you can store components for repeated use.
For those building Flex applications, there is the added benefit that Thermo produces code that the developers can use. That feature won’t help me, but the rest of the application is more than enough to make me salivate. Considering that I currently have to slice up my Photoshop files and export graphics for use in Director or Dreamweaver when I want to make a prototype, this will significantly cut down the time and effort involved. In fact, I will likely do prototypes more often with Thermo, simply because it is so quick to do them—I can afford to take that amount of time. Finally, it will be released for both Macintosh and Windows.
It’s still going to be in development for several months, and I was happy to see Narciso eagerly taking notes on the comments we were making. I can’t wait to add Thermo to my arsenal. You can see bits and pieces of the demo Narciso gave me in a video from Adobe’s Edge newsletter. Check out the Adobe Labs for more information.