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Ted Patrick just posted a screencast from Mark Anders where he gives a great overview of the roadmap for Flex 4 aka Gumbo , Flash Player 10, Degrafa and Thermo at 360 Flex.
Having such an advanced look at their road is really great for the community. I hope this trend continues for Adobe. It's not easy because early feedback can be very positive or very critical. As Ryan Stewart puts it:
"It’s been a fun and hard problem to solve. We’re also trying to be very open and transparent. We want to get your hands on it as early as possible, so we’re planning to make the bits available as soon as possible. The build probably won’t have the full bells and whistles, and the actual product release is still a ways off, but I think you’ll enjoy jumping in and kicking the tires while helping us drive features for the product as we march on to a 1.0 release."
My two big questions about Thermo remain: will it be easy enough for designers to benefit from? Secondly will developers accept the code it generates? What do you think?
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I don't see why we need another software between what designer use (photoshop and illustrator) and Flex Builder. Are they going to implement all the designer features in Thermo? Of course not. Why can't Thermo be integrated in Flex Builder? I hope it will. Now that the components view can be well separated by the logic I can see a Silverlight approach working (the mxml generated by Photoshop or Illustrator, maybe after declaring which component we are skinning so that Photoshop can help assigning binding and stuff). The problem of course won't be generating the mxml but updating it, MS is struggling with that but with the new skinning architecture I reckon Adobe can do it.
As Thermo is also built on Eclipse, I would assume that Thermo will come as a standalone and also a plugin for Eclipse as Flex Builder does now.
That's true, I am just a bit concerned about the eventual extra license cost. I am also not convinced that Thermo should have designer features inside (in the demo he draws the scrollbar). I am hoping that the creative suite will be able to edit the mxml containing FXG, not just exporting it.
To me, it might seem as Adobe is trying to do the same that they did with Flash:
Flash became an authoring tool and they decided to appeal to programmers with Flex and Air...so Thermo might end up being Adobe's attempt to not alienate the graphic designers...which, by the way, are already alienated! (check the comments on http://www.insideria.com/2008/07/the-charges-against-actionscri.html if you dont know about it already)
It's not a war between designers and coders, but it seems Adobe is planning to do business with both by segmentating the market even more...
At least, that is what I think they're trying to do. Most Designers and designers that know scripting are mostly disappointed with Flash already.