A Demo of Thermo, a Wicked Good Tool for RIA's

One of the highlights of the 2007 Adobe MAX (developer's) conference for me was the demonstration of Adobe's next-generation prototyping and developer/designer tool code-named "Thermo." It's a great example of rapid application development: designers (or developers like me with limited design skill) can quickly prototype a Flex application, even going so far as to import an composite image from Photoshop and having the tool recognize the controls in the image and convert them in to real Flex controls. The tool is smart about watching what you're doing and the controls you are laying out and offers to, say, turn a series of repeated controls in to a real repeater in MXML. It's helpful in a good way, not a Microsoft Office Clippy way.

If you haven't seen a demo of the tool, there's a video from C|Net's Web 2.0 coverage. Thermo has a lot of promise, and I hope it can make good on that promise because if it does, it will make developing Flex applications that much easier and faster.