Adobe Demos "Thermo" RIA Design Tool to Delighted Crowd

This sounds quite interesting:

Josh Catone in Adobe Demos "Thermo" RIA Design Tool to Delighted Crowd:

The presenters really got the MAX crowd rocking by showing off Thermo's "Convert artwork to..." feature. In a matter of a couple of clicks, a text input box on the UI went from static image to actual form field with the MXML code rendered automatically. Thermo even preserved styling of the form element from the PSD mockup.

The code view for Thermo is actually the full Flex Builder application, which means that it is a powerful development tool for programmers, as well. The idea is that developers can write underlying business logic for a Flex application while designers work on look and feel all from inside the same environment, and the process is as painless as possible for both sides.

But I have my doubts. That awfully sounds like code generation and as to the best of my knowledge that's usually a one-way street. You use a tool to generate the code and once you start making changes to the generated code you can't use the tool anymore or have to reapply the changes again.

On the other hand if that "Convert Artwork To ..." function creates a component, that would be a good solution. I might have to look into Adobe Flex a bit more to understand what's going on here. But at the very least this is an interesting idea and I'm going to see whether we can adopt it a bit and make use of it in our collaboration with a designer we've just added to our Savila development team.

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