Since I first heard about Flex over a year ago and started working with it I have been very impressed. It’s a great platform for developers to create amazing web applications on… but for me there has been one big elephant in the room, and that’s the designer developer workflow!

We’ve all seen Blend combined with XAML now, and if you’re anything like me the first thing you thought when you saw it was why on earth cant Adobe do that with mxml!!!! And now it looks like they have with the project codenamed Thermo.

Thermo allows designers to use the tools they love (like the mouse…) and to draw the application as that want it. Thermo will then convert, on the fly (or when imported from a program like photoshop) the graphics into mxml! Perfect! It even allows for visual tweaking of motions and transitions. Its looks the the application I have been dreaming the Flash IDE would become for ages!

I personally can’t wait to see what comes of this… my hope (and this may be pie in the sky right now) is that we can in the not too distant future say goodbye to the Flash IDE (well, us developers at least). This would enable developers to focus on building applications rather that bullying design into behaving like one!

For more info on thermo check out this demo.