Normally I don’t like to spend a lot of time just posting links to other people’s blog posts, but since MXNA is down, I wanted to point out Rob Adams’s excellent blog post about the paper prototype studies we’ve been doing on Thermo’s UI. His post has a lot of great tips on how to effectively set up a paper study.

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It’s been busy here in Thermo-land, as we work furiously (no really! we’re furious people!) to turn our vision into reality. I have a fun side project that I’m going to post about in a little bit once I get a few bugs worked out. In the meantime, here’s a video interview that Ryan Stewart, Thermo evangelist extraordinaire, did with me about designer/developer workflow in Thermo and Flex 4. It was our first video, so it’s a little blurry and off-center, but just pretend it’s artsy and edgy and you’ll be fine. (We did edit out the part where the siren went off when someone went out the wrong door in the cafeteria.)

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I’ve been so busy that I completely forgot to mention that my article on designing Flex 3 skins and styles using Creative Suite 3 and Flex Builder 3 went live on the Flex Developer Center when we launched Flex 3. Check it out for information on how to use CS3 with Flex Builder, as well as the new CSS Design View in Flex Builder.

Also, Juan Sanchez of ScaleNine, who built the CS3 Flex skin templates, has just posted some great tips and tricks for using the skin templates. Thanks Juan!

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The big day is finally here! Flex Builder 3 is shipping, and the Flex 3 SDK and AIR 1.0 runtime are available for free download. I actually hadn’t been keeping up with all the latest AIR stuff, so it’s been fun checking out all the great AIR apps that have already been posted.

We’ve also just launched the Adobe Open Source portal, a one-stop shop for all Adobe open source technologies, including Flex, BlazeDS, and Tamarin.

Download, design, develop, and enjoy!

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A number of people have written me over the past few months to mention that they’ve had trouble getting the Reflection component to work in various cases. I haven’t had time to look at each of the problems, but I do have an updated version of Reflector.as that may work better. If you’ve been having trouble with the original Reflector code, try this one out and let me know if it fixes your problem.

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Thermo is hiring, and one of our first job openings is for someone to help us create a next-generation learning experience. We want to make it easy for designers to get up to speed on Thermo quickly, and we’re going to need to communicate Thermo’s concepts through traditional written documentation, diagrams, videos, animations, smoke signals, and however else we can convey them.

Our ideal candidate is either a writer with strong design skills or a designer with strong writing skills. Most importantly, we’re looking for someone who has innovative ideas about how to enhance the learning experience for a professional design tool that’s technically deep.

Have a look at the job description (pdf), and if you think you’re the right person for the job, please contact Randy Nielsen directly (his email is at the bottom of the job description).

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I’m going to be at IxDA Interaction ‘08 in Savannah this weekend with some other folks from the Thermo team. There was a recent thread on the IxDA mailing list with lots of interesting thoughts on features interaction designers would want in a design tool, and I’m hoping to chat about the subject with other folks at the conference. If you’re going to be there, let me know–maybe we can meet up!

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A new face in the Flex blogosphere: Ethan Eismann. Ethan is on the Experience Design (XD) team at Adobe, working on the design of Thermo, and I’m sure he’ll have all sorts of interesting thoughts on design. Welcome Ethan!

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The Adobe Edge newsletter has a new Thermo video up. It’s the same demo we did at MAX, but it’s higher-quality and easier to watch than the YouTube version. Check it out!

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Nahuel Foronda just posted a cool example of a button skin that uses states in order to create a color animation on mouse over. The skin is written almost entirely in pure MXML, with a little bit of AS just to attach the filters to the button label. This really shows the power of using declarative states to implement a skin instead of having to write a bunch of procedural code, and as Nahuel points out, when we add graphics tags to the framework it will become even more powerful.

One modification that might be interesting would be to see if he could use an MXML transition to create the color animation instead of using Darron Schall’s AnimateColor component. I bet that would work, but haven’t tried it myself yet.

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