In the early nineteen hundreds, Napoleon Hill, the famed author of “Think and Grow Rich” sought to write upon the subject of success by looking at what had motivated the millionaires of his day, those who had gone from rags to riches, the first wave of American royalty so to speak.  Of course, his book came to recognize that the ‘one thing’ that motivated each of the subjects of his studies was determined by each of them through a careful self-examination, and his writing attempted to inspire the reader to reach deep within and find that ‘one thing’ in themselves.

Recently, I attempted to carry this notion to the field of web design and development, and it led me to some conclusions I had not examined before.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Firstly, let me say that I’ve been involved in online for about six years now, about half of that commercially.  Recently I’ve encountered a wave of people, working, well-respected, by all accounts successful, who seem to have lost their drive for the business.  I asked myself why that was.

The conclusion I came to was a bit of a revelation.  Think about this (and you might have to think far back here)…did any of us get into web development to make websites professionally?  I know of almost nobody who can truthfully answer yes to that question.  No, we got into making websites because we had something important to say, our ‘one thing’ and we wanted to say it to a wider audience.  We discovered a talent for delivering things online, and we discovered that people would pay us to do it.  Why not?  We had financial obligations to meet.  So we went the route of helping others realize their visions, we told their stories, but always there in the back of the mind sat our ‘one thing’ patiently waiting its turn.

There is something noble about the notion of using our skills and talents to help others tell their stories.  So how does a person awake one day to find themselves completely unmotivated to do it?  There are many factors involved, but I believe that at the very heart of it lies one problem: they forgot about their one thing.  Put aside for so long, that ‘one thing’ expired, and with it a good deal of what trully motivated them to work in the online space.  It happens subtley, it creeps up on us unexpectedly, but given time and neglect that one thing will depart.  Sadly, some are never able to get that ‘one thing’ back.

The good news is that it does not take a lot to keep that ‘one thing’ alive.  The human will is ridiculously optimistic given half a chance, and the smallest investment in our ‘one thing’ can keep us engaged, knowing that this important thing is stilll a part of us.

How can you tell if that ‘one thing’ is suffering from neglect?  Ask yourself this: was there a time when you couldn’t wait to get home and fire up the computer?  Did that fade to just the weekends, or perhaps not at all?  When was the last time you took on a deep project, or do you rather peck at small blackberry-sized information bits like someone who has lost their appetite approaches a meal?  Have you asked yourself whether you are even meant to be in the business anymore, based on how eager you used to be compared to now?  If so, you need to immediately reach far back in your memory and ask yourself what your ‘one thing’ was.  When you have remembered it, grab tight hold of it, and do something about it immediately.  It will be very hard to start, because deep inside we are afraid to fail at our ‘one thing’.  Secretly, that is what made it easy for us to set aside our ‘one thing’ in the first place.

Napoleon Hill could not suggest to anyone what their ‘one thing’ was, nor can I.  For some it is drawing and painting, for others a desire to write.  Some are community builders and they once had a great idea for their team/club/association.  The ‘one thing’ is unique and only the individual can really say what it is.  Scrap books, family trees, blogs, these all come out of an individual’s need to keep in touch with their ‘one thing’.

This is a simple notion, but a powerful one.  Everyone has to fight to keep that ‘one thing’ alive for themselves, guarding it jealously, feeding it a little of our time each day.  Don’t lose sight of it, the consequences can be very unforgiving.

Recently Adobe folks announced a new product code-named “Thermo” at Max. What is Thermo? Good question, a lot of different people will see it in different ways. Essentially Thermo is a visual tool that allows you take graphics in a visual environment and generate code that will recreate the image as a Flex application.

So for me, Thermo is a code-generator, and a very nice one. My question though, is why the separate product? I mean, isn’t this what the point of layout view in FlexBuilder was? The problem was that nobody used layout view in FlexBuilder because it was too bare-bones. It didn’t support import of PSD files the way that Flash did. It didn’t update styles until runtime, so essentially it was useless and mose people never got into it.

Why not Adobe people, make Thermo the new layout view of FlexBuilder (and I apologize if that is in fact the plan – the videos I’ve seen didn’t categorically say so). Show some love to the folks who bought in early on the whole Flex concept and suffered through the anemic layout view. With the combined power of FlexBuilder’s coding tools, and a superior layout view that Thermo could provide, you would really have a good thing going. Demos of Thermo show flipping into code view, but frankly Flex people will be reluctant to work outside of the code editor they have gotten used to.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of Thermo. I’ve been making my own such tools for years (going right back to my TRS80 Color Computer) and can state that there is nothing better than having the ‘puter write your code for you. That said, there is unlikely to be a code generator, no matter how well-made that can replace the brain of the developer. Did dreamweaver replace HTML/CSS coders? No, and that is because there does not exist the WYSIWYG editor that can account for all situations, particularly when dealing with dynamic data, which is obviously the case for rich internet applications. The whole auto-generation of dummy-data for your application, well that’s just freaking cool. Generators are perfect for that. Thermo is a specific tool for a specific situation – namely seeing a layout for a specific state of an application. That one task will be easier, as will be the workflow for creating that state. However, wiring it all up will still be the domain of the application architect. Less monkey-work, more high-concept…I like it alot.

I really hope that Thermo will be templated up the wazoo. By that, I mean that customization will make or break the product for me. I’d like to be able to tell Thermo to generate code in the manner that I want it to, be it with my own particular code conventions, or even just my own particular ordering. If code generated by Thermo is rigidly constrained to a particular style, that will bug me a bit. For instance, maybe I like to name my variables in a certain way (I long ago adopted a Python-style convention for my variables) – I’d like to be able to install a template for that so the particular convention gets used whenever I Thermo-size my application state.

I also wonder about custom components and how they will mesh with Thermo. My guess is that if you’ve made your Flex component with good practice, it’ll just work with Thermo, but of course that is pure speculation on my part.

I deal with designers all the time who find it frustrating to not understand code and have to run to a developer every time they want to see their designs functioning. Developers get frustrated as well by having to spend endless hours tweaking their work to make it fit the vision of the designer. I see Thermo being a real plus for both of these folks, a bridge if you will, that allows them to talk in a common visual language. I’m giving Thermo an optimistic thumbs up right now, as a concept in development. Can’t wait to get my grubby paws on it.