I’m speaking here primarily from my experiences as a UI designer, so take this as you will. I’ve been doing some reading recently in About Face 3, a great book by the way, highly recommended. It brought together some thoughts I’d been having and, so, inspired this post. So what do I think the all important tool is?
It might just be my impression of it, but this year’s MAX seemed to have a lot more for designers. With Thermo bringing the promise of more easily styled Flex apps, new extensions for most of the CS3 apps to create skins, the new filters promised in Flash 10, there was a lot of material there. It’s going to be exciting watching Flex apps move more solidly away from the “Flex Look” that seems so prevalent right now. I know I came away from it committed to stepping up the style on the apps I work on, and making them even more intuitive.
The day two keynote of MAX just wrapped up earlier today. I wasn’t expecting much, I thought we’d probably seen all the coolest stuff yesterday. I was wrong, very wrong. Thermo is going to make things very interesting. The idea of taking a photoshop mockup and converting it into an application with nice ways to create dummy data is going to be revolutionary. I’ve already heard some people grumbling about the code behind the interface, but I think it’s an awesome starting point. We need more Flex apps that don’t look like Flex apps. More free-form, more interesting. Yes people will do bad things, it’s what happens with powerful, flexible tools. Now who do I talk to so that I can get this now, instead of next year?