Adobe Edge

Did adobe just kill Flash themselves?

Adobe released the first preview of their new HTML5 media authoring tool called Edge. To give this a ultra-fast test-drive we wanted to see what we could produce in just 5 mins using the software for the very first time and what that output actually looks like. The results are actually quite impressive.

For our test we elected to try something very simple and see how it looks. A single background image, in motion, with a rounded corner rectangle floating across it, changing colours, and then fading text. Basically standard elements of an animation.

You can view our ultra-quick-and-dirty creation here:
http://www.pawprint.net/edgetest/

More interesting are some of the discoveries about the output.

Rendered Output Details

• The edge datafile itself consists of JSON encoded data
• The resulting output consists of an html file, css file, custom JS, images folder, and some standard includes.
• The javascript includes folder contains JQuery 1.4.2 and the JQuery easing plugin

To see the structure yourself download our composition here:
EdgeTest.zip

Our Impressions:
This has some great potential although it will still have the code bulk of any WYSIWYG system the resulting output seems very clean from a foundation point of view and that bodes well for where this could go. Certainly a tool to watch for anyone building media for the web who doesn´t want to get into anything to do with Flash anymore and prefers to work in a tool rather then mess with code and CSS manually.

To download Edge yourself:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/

A quick video preview of Edge

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