I’ve just read some pretty valid concerns over at EverythingFlex with regards to Thermo, announced yesterday at MAX. I thought I’d post my response on here…
At first I was also a little scared by this [tool]. But if you look at how it is at present, as Tink mentions there, you have to export layers out of Photoshop (which is a skill in itself unless your designer is ultra neat and doesn’t have a thousand layers with adjustments and masks). This means you are expecting your developers to be extremely savvy with Photoshop, luckily a lot of Flashers are, but that’s not always the case, particularly with Flex devs.
At the very least this tool takes some of that pain away, even if it is not a round trip processes, it should still help to provide assets that you might otherwise have had to spend a lot of your own time generating. As for generating the assets with code, that’s only possible in very few occaisions and it’s always a decision that has to be made on a per case basis. Sometimes it can really hinder a project to find you are creating a circle with code, when you need to then go apply a gradient to it, because what we then find is instead of giving a designer a structured FLA, it instead shifts the creative changes back on the Flash developers already busy role.
Anything that can reduce the cost of Flash and Flex projects gets my vote. Looking forward to giving Thermo a test run and seeing exactly what it ends up generating.