Thermo turned to be a Catalyst

Nei­ther Ther­mo­stat nor Ther­monu­clear, just Thermo. Adobe Thermo. A weird name for a prod­uct that many have been wait­ing for. It was intro­duced at Adobe MAX Chicago in 2007 but apart from a few screen­shots and one or two videos, it was hard to find detailed infor­ma­tion about this “upcom­ing” soft­ware.

At that time, Sean Cor­field wrote a good sum­mary of Thermo.

Start­ing with a Pho­to­shop PSD file, Thermo imported this and con­verted it to MXML. Design ele­ments can then be selected and with a sim­ple right-click they can be con­verted from art­work to Flex con­trols. The auto­matic infer­ence of design-time data sets so you could test UI inter­ac­tions with “real” data was very impressive.

Mark Anders, vice pres­i­dent of engi­neer­ing for Adobe, also told this.

Thermo, which is in the early stages of devel­op­ment, is built on the Flex Builder devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment, a tool the com­pany already offers to help bridge the gap between devel­op­ers and design­ers. Flex pro­vides work­flows devel­op­ers can rec­og­nize to ren­der visual parts of the appli­ca­tion so it’s eas­ier for them to add visual ele­ments to an RIA. Design­ers using Thermo don’t have to write code for their appli­ca­tions, but they can choose to view the source code and see it in a Flex Builder edi­tor that they can work with if they want to, Anders said.

Rejoice (should we ?) for it is called Thermo no more. From now on, it’s Adobe Cat­a­lyst. The name isn’t bad con­sid­er­ing it will speed up project devel­op­ments (hopefully !).

Wait­ing for the release, you can already drool over the video that Adobe pub­lished on their Labs web­site.

As it seems focused on Flex, I won­der what will become of Flash itself as Cat­a­lyst will fill the gap between graphic design­ers and flex devel­op­ers but not between graphic design­ers and flash developers.

An early release of Cat­a­lyst was avail­able to those attend­ing MAX at San Fran­sico but it’s still gone pub­lic. You can signup on Labs if you want to be noticed of the release.

For more con­crete sam­ples, go take a look at the Cat­a­lyst team blog.