Edge, Adobe’s new web motion and interaction design tool, now available as a preview

Seth Weintraub | Jul 31 2011 - 9:26 pm PT

Adobe today released its “Flash for HTML5” web design tool Edge into Beta.

Adobe® Edge is a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3.

This version of Edge focuses primarily on adding rich motion design to new or existing HTML projects, that runs beautifully on devices and desktops.

Create new compositions with Edge’s drawing and text tools.

Import popular web graphics such as SVG, PNG, JPG or GIF files.

Easily choreograph animation with the timeline editor. Animate position, size, color, shape, rotation and more at the property level.

Energize existing HTML files with motion, while preserving the integrity of CSS-based HTML layouts.

Copy and paste transitions, invert them, and choose from over 25 built-in easing effects for added creativity.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FnNtX73v8k]

Two example videos and feature breakdown below (Via The Loop):

Feature	Description
Intuitive user Interface	The user interface is based on a stage, timeline, and panels for elements and properties. It’s influenced by our customers’ favorite features and functionality in class-leading tools like After Effects and Flash Professional, but innovates in its ease of use. Animations and timing can be controlled on a WebKit-based stage, or via precise property adjustments directly on the timeline. You can also make quick edits on individual or multiple objects.
Visually author animated content	Create new compositions from scratch using basic HTML building blocks, text, and imported web graphics. Manipulate objects with an array of transformation and styling options which Edge natively applies to our jQuery-based animation framework.
Add motion to existing HTML content	Add motion elements to existing HTML web documents. Edge stores all of its animation in a separate JavaScript file that cleanly distinguishes the original HTML from Edge’s animation code. Edge makes minimal, non-intrusive changes to the HTML code to reference the JavaScript and CSS files it creates.
Import web graphics files	Import existing web graphics such as SVG, JPG, PNG, and GIF files.
Standards-based output	Edge reads and writes HTML, CSS and JavaScript files natively. Animated content produced in Edge is expressed in a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data structure that preserves the CSS-based layout. JSON is a formatting style for JavaScript that is easily readable, and allows more flexibility to work with the document and animated content independently.
Reliable content on desktops and devices	Animated content created with Edge is designed and tested to work reliably on the iOS and Android platforms, WebKit-enabled devices, and popular desktop browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer 9.