Throughout the past year I participated in the public Beta of Adobe's new Edge product. It is now released as Adobe Edge Animate 1.0. The big news: Adobe is releasing this powerful tool for FREE. You can read the announcement here. Like a modern iPhone game developer or a crack dealer of old, Adobe is giving you this "taste" for free, certain that, as the product evolves, you will return with money in hand, ready to buy some more. And you will.
With the demise of Flash support on mobile platforms and the waning interest on the desktop, the writing was on the wall. Although Flash is not dead, I have to say that its life cycle is on the wane. Fortunately new standards and technologies are getting better integrated into browsers every day. Edge Animate is a tool that makes use of HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery to produce cross-platform animation and interactivity on a wide variety of web browsers without the need for any plug-ins.
The workflow in edge is great. It's actually closer to the timeline in After Effects than the one in Flash. They've pioneered something called "The Pin" which allows you to set a current keyframe and a future keyframe without having to jump back and forth in the timeline. This is one feature I'd like to see make its way into After Effects.
I recently updated the banners on my my site and I am pleased. They load relatively quickly and the animation plays back pretty smooth on most browsers I have tested. So thanks for the free "taste" Adobe. I'm sure many people will come along for the next version.
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