Adobe Thermo – New screenshots

Ted Patrick has posted a nice bunch of Thermo screenshots.  Thermo is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to visually create working RIAs. Applications created in Thermo are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers. Here are the screens.

Hoping to see a lot more at Adobe MAX 2008 !!

[OnFlex]  

Photoshop CS4 – GPU and Physics Support

Adobe recently gave a demonstration, at Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, of  "Creative Suite Next" (or CS4), code-named “Stonehenge”, which adds GPU and physics support to its existing multi-core support.

TG Daily reports on this presentation by Adobe.

We saw the presenter playing with a 2 GB, 442 megapixel image like it was a 5 megapixel image on an 8-core Skulltrail system. Changes made through image zoom and through a new rotate canvas tool were applied almost instantly. Another impressive feature was the import of a 3D model into Photoshop, adding text and paint on a 3D surface and having that surface directly rendered with the 3D models’ reflection map.

Also part of the demo was Photoshop 3D accelerated panorama which lets artists to work inside a spherical image and fix any artifacts on the fly.

All of these new features are part of Photoshop CS4, which should be a part of the “CS Next” suite. The package is expected to be released on October 1 !!

Flash Player 10 – What does it pack?

Flash Player 10 public beta, code named named "Astro" was released a few days ago. You  can get it from Adobe labs. This new release has a ton of new stuff that’s gonna blow the minds of anyone who is playing around with Flash because it spans things like Rich-text (finally, right to left!!), 3D effects, Dynamic streaming, more Hardware acceleration, and custom filters that you can create yourself with Pixel Bender. Unfortunately we don’t have any tooling support for the beta yet, so if you want to dig in you’ll have to wait a bit.

• Custom Filters and Effects
  • This feature is pretty cool. Portable Filters, created using Pixel Blender which happens to be the same technology behind After Effects CS3. And adobe claims that custom filters will not make a big impact on the size of the app.
• 3D Effects
  • This was very obvious. I’ve been expecting this for a long time. PaperVision 3d, Sandy, Away 3d, everyone is in the game.
• New Text Engine
  • A brand new flexible text engine. And yes, right to left text flow and a whole lot more in here.
• GPU Compositing
  • Utilizing the processing power of the graphics card, Astro will accelerate compositing calculations faster than would be performed in software mode on the CPU. Open GL 2.0 video card with GLSL capabilities required for this feature to work.
• Dynamic Streaming
  • Video Streams that can automatically adjust to changing network conditions.
• File Reference (finally !!)
• Ubuntu OS Support

Download Flash Player 10 beta from here and Pixel Blender from here.

JavaFX – An awesome demo at JavaOne

2008 JavaOne Conference, Sun’s yearly developer conference, saw an interesting little demo of JavaFX, Sun’s very own RIA platform. Though the demo crashed more than a couple of times, it was pretty awesome to look at. The same JavaFX code running in a web page, desktop and a mobile phone. Check it out…

 

 

The idea of simple dragging a web app off the web page and have it on the desktop is just…Wow…And hardware accelerated 3d animations….I never saw this coming..

Anyway its great to see new things coming up in the RIA world. Maybe JavaFX if the next big thing!