So, Adobe Thermo (an upcoming product that “makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs”) is promising to ease the problem that has plagued rich internet applications since time immemorial (ok, fine, since 2001) : the often troubled interaction between the designers who make the motion samples and comps that the clients buy into and the developers who write the code that makes up the application that the users will actually use. Is it going to happen for real? Is a tool that lets designers generate code really going to solve all these problems?

I’d hedge my bets on a safe “yes and no.” No tool can replace those invaluable designers who understand the strengths and weaknesses of the technology that their designs will be implemented in, nor can it replace a developer with a talent for bringing a design to life with solid, maintainable code.

That said, Thermo might ease one of the things that developers dislike the most– generating boilerplate code for designs–and let designers take a more active role in the actual development of the project. Nobody is happy when a painstakingly assembled design gets butchered in development, but even in the best teams it happens. If a tool can ease some of this by helping designers actually tweak the layout of Flex applications, leaving the developer to work with the guts of the app, I’m all for it.

That Adobe is trying to provide tools to mitigate workflow problems means they’re really listening to their consumer base, i.e. designers and developers. Whether Thermo is the last and best solution for workflow issues or not, it’s encouraging that, as we’re pushing Flash and Flex forward on both sides, Adobe is listening to what we want.

There’s a really interesting discussion getting kicked around the blogosphere right now about this very topic on Grant Skinner’s blog, with a response/clarification at Rictus.

Videos of the Thermo demo from Adobe MAX are here: part 1, part 2, and part 3.