Thermo = mix( video.Maru, RIA );
September 22nd, 2007 . by polyGeekThere’s an Adobe project code named Thermo that’s having its coming out party at MAX07 in Chicago. Mark Anders posted a job opening for a PM at Adobe that Sam Robbins at pixelConsumption found and wrote about.
Here’s the basic job description:
You will lead a highly motivated team developing an innovative new tool, codenamed Thermo, that will enable designers and creatively inclined developers to easily build rich internet applications and interactive content.
It’s sounds like video.Maru applied to lots of other components. I’ve had video.Maru users ask me to apply the same approach to a number of components, like scrollbars, knobs, mp3 players, etc.
The approach that video.Maru uses is simple. If something is called a play_btn and there’s a videoWindow nearby then maybe when the users clicks on the play_btn it should play that video. This is all done without the designer needing to write any code.
While at the 360Flex conference in San Jose I was showing some of the attendees how video.Maru worked. One of the Flex team members walked by and started watching - I’m not saying who it was. After a few seconds they said, “Ummmm, that looks like something we’re adding to Flex 3″ and walked off.
So, weather it’s Thermo or something else. It looks like making RIA is going to get a lot easier. And I can’t wait to get to MAX.
I’ve used video.Maru in a few projects.. and if Thermo is anything like Maru… I’ll be one happy man.
@Mike, I’m right there with you. Easier is better.
Primarily Flash is focused on Designers and with the new relation component from Flash to Flex, the workflow has been perfected. I am sure, that adding components with “no code” to the developer friendly Flex is “not easier” for the developer.
@durech, I think it all depends on implementation. Again, looking at video.Maru as an example. It makes things easier for the developer as well as the designer. And the designer can use the API to make it do things that couldn’t be done otherwise. You can start thinking of video.Maru as a Flash video playing platform and make it do all sorts of things easier than if you built from scratch. That’s because a created a framework to do all the low level stuff.
I have faith that Adobe could do similar things with RIAs.
and then you go to the real world, where clients ask for things not implemented on the “one for all” solutions, and you are back to “not easier”, of course the designer and the boss are thinking any change is easy, “the tool did it in just 1 or 2 clicks, right?”
And 9 out of 10 times when they think it will be easy… it just won’t. as a matter of fact it will be harder than when they think otherwise.
this kind of tools sould have a legend:
“easy for designers, hell for developers” :)
@Freddy, I get this all the time myself. It seems like managers always have things reversed. They’ll ask, “Is it possible to do X?” And I’ll say, “Sure” update the XML and done.
Then they’ll say, “Oh, and add this feature to.” Like it’s no big deal and you have to tell them, “Oh, that’s a huge request and could take …”
Life as a dev I guess.
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