TRINIX

A couple of months ago, I saw some promissing screencast of Adobe MAX convention about the new tool Adobe was working on.

The RIA tool was called “Thermo” and allows non technical people to put together a complete prototype of an application by simply drag and drop elements. This will close the gap between the design and development of applications. Thermo will provide the functionality to simulate application behavior and making it easier to build complete mock-ups for demo’s or for providing to the IT development teams. I think that this tool will be a great improvement for all the project managers. Giving them a lot of freedom to put together applications and playing around without actually having to develop everything. This tool could replace the wireframe design and speed up application development. I’m anxious awaiting the release.

Official Adobe description: “Thermo is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.”

More info can be found on the official Adobe Labs website: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo

A couple of screenshots:

A couple of Youtube previews:

I recently discovered “Lovely Charts” (http://www.lovelycharts.com). It’s an online Rich Internet Application build in Flex (flash GUI) and a PHP / MySQL back-end. It’s developed in Belgium (my country by Jérôme Cordiez (active at http://www.thisislovely.com ) and it’s really a piece of art.

Lovely charts allows you to create online charts – Diagrams – wireframes – …

This is like MS Visio but then really nice and easy and most important of all it’s ONLINE!!!
The interface is really intuitive and the functionality is almost complete (it’s still in Beta fase).

You can draw with lovely charts:

• Flowcharts
• Sitemaps
• Wireframes
• Organigram charts
• Network diagrams

The diagram symbols are vectorized and have a nice modern touch. The result are impressive charts and diagrams with a professional look. I tested already for personal use and now i’m even using it at my work as a Product Manager at StepStone Belgium. For my projects I have to create a lot of sitemaps, wireframes, diagrams, … and this tool just won over MS Visio. Creating complex sitemaps is no issue anymore. You can play around with all different arrows, colors, elements and symbols. Lovely charts allow you to create even the simplest or really complex diagrams without any problems, linking the different elements with one simple click. You can even specify the different types of arrow lines. When you are finished you can export your diagram / chart to a JPEG or PNG.

Everything is really straigtforward:

• drag-drop
• resize
• link elements
• adding text
• export

You can even select and manipulate multipe elements or use the keyboard to do actions.

I can’t say in words how much I like lovely Charts but just take a look at the impressive gallery and believe me afterwards you will signup. And the diagrams presented in the gallery are really created with lovely charts.

It’s a free service with the possibility to signup for a premium account.
With this premium account you can save your diagrams online.

Have a look at their gallery and watch the screencast at their nicely designed website
and Signup now for a free account