The news is out on what Adobe’s Thermo is, and it’s basically what I had predicted and hoped for. In essence, it is a graphical non-programming tool that let’s designers bring images to life as interactive elements for web apps. As Adobe puts it, you can:
Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a “skin”.
That’s really cool stuff! Too bad we have to wait until summer, but it is one more obstacle removed from taking visual design to reality on a web application’s user interface. I don’t think it will be quite the whole Magic Ink vision, but it looks very close and very useful already. They’ll build on it more from there.
Interestingly, Magic Ink’s creator, Bret Victor sent me a note saying he’d been interviewed for the post at Adobe that started the speculation, but had taken an even more exciting job at Google Apple. Geez, now we have to guess what that might be! And BTW, Bret was a gentleman and wouldn’t confirm or deny what Thermo might be.
I love it when a plan comes together!
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