Previously, building high fidelity UI mock-ups was exclusively the domain of developers. Now (if Thermo works as advertised) interaction designers, information architects and usability researchers can be involved in the activity. Currently, the loop from user research findings, to code iteration, and then to re-testing can take a while. Thermo (or something like Thermo) could cut the loop entirely.

Personally, instead of using Photoshop I’d rather have a tool more like Visio, Omnigraffle or Axure to input into Thermo.

- Only produces Flex, so doesn’t integrate into just any architecture. If I’ve got an already running web app that uses behaviors from javascript library X, I’m probably out of luck.

- Working with dummy data is great, as long as your application is fairly simple. Is there persistence across multiple pages? I design a lot of pages that have a large number of conditional states, which would be incredibly hard to mock up in Photoshop.

- It seems something like this serves to discourage collaboration with developers. A functional prototype is great, but there’s a lot more that needs to be communicated with developers that won’t be apparent from running the prototype.

Also, the premise that all interface designs start with Photoshop is somewhat bogus. I don’t know anyone who works that way unless they’re producing brochureware.

“We’re not doing a general solution for anyone to build an application. That’s one of the key things–we had to be specific about who the audience is. [...] It’s for people who [...] have a background in interface design [...] But they are primarily a designer. ”

Source: News.com article “Adobe plots its path on the Web” (4th Oct 07)

http://tinyurl.com/yut5o8

great find.