After the demo of Thermo, there were few conversations with people at Max that didn’t eventually involve talking about it. It’s pretty amazing. I can’t wait to get my hands on it as it certainly will help my development team work with the design team. It should speed up the design process greatly. And knowing that the mockups they produce, can, *if they have to*, become full fledged RIAs in hours not days or weeks is pretty awesome to say the least!

Like a number of posts out there, though, I have my reservations.

• The MXML equivalent of “DIVitis” – Divitis is is condition in HTML documentts where an overabundance of unecessary tags is used to help control a webpage’s layout in an excessive manner. Looking at the MXML that Thermo was producing, it looks like it might just be doing the Flex builder equivalent to an RIA of what Dreamweaver can do to a website if you aren’t careful. Not only would MXML like this possibly be difficult to maintain, it does really prevent you from being able to practice good MVC techniques when the interactivity is so closely wired into the visual components.
• MX:Graphic / MX:Rect – I think these were the elements that Thermo created for the fancy tricks at the show. WTF? Seriously, this namespace is just getting huge! Why can’t the Graphic and Rect be attributes in existing components? Even cooler would be a Thermo namespace (eg: <Thermo:Rect> or <TH:Rect>… then you would know exactly where things came from, and it might just aid in roundtripping the stuff back through Thermo to the original apps. Or not.
• Piles of images to load for clients - One thing not many people mentioned was the large number of PNGs generated by the thermo image slice up voodoo. now, I’m sure you can apply JPEG compression to ‘em, but let’s face it, an HTTP connection is an HTTP connection, right? That¬† many external images could be a bottleneck in app loading.
• Whatever happened to styling/skinning? – We need some attention in Thermo given to a smarter approach to styling. Let’s get some intelligence so that Thermo knows when it should make vector buttons, when it should create a programmatic skin, when it should simply apply css to a stock component. Maybe this is too much to ask for a 1.0 product/plugin, but it’s the kind of thing that really will get it some respect with developers.
• How does it handle Apollo transparent windows? - Not really a reservation, but a question. How can you define the transparent regions, drag areas, etc.
• Will every designer think they can design UIs now? – I see a whole world of potential for a repeat of the Flash 4 criticisms of days of old. Flash is 99% crap, etc…. if it really is so easy to make an RIA, does it cheapen the term?
• My managers are just going to crap – Oh jeez another app to buy. This with Flex Builder 3 and the impending licensing terms for AIR and the “sneak previewed, sure to come out sooner than the capital expenditure budget would like” CS4… We spend so much much $ to stay in the game. Here is another little cog you need to be able to keep up with the Jones’.

Anyway, Thermo sure looks cool, and I definitely cannot wait to get my grubby little mouse on it. I’d like some feedback on my thoughts, what gets you going about Thermo? What are you planning on doing with it?

Posted on October 6, 2007

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