Adobe Labs has unveiled a public preview release of Adobe Edge, the company’s own take on HTML5 animation and interaction design. The free download is available now for both Mac and Windows platforms, but should be considered pre-beta software. The tool in some senses competes with Adobe’s own Flash Professional, allowing web designers to create motion and interactive elements using standards such as HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3.
Users can either create animations from scratch or work with existing HTML documents, as it works natively with HTML. The program can import standard web graphics formats including GIF, SVG, JPG and PNG, and the software uses WebKit as its engine for designing and previewing the animations, ensuring compatibility with web standards. Edge uses a video-like timeline system to enable dramatically easier syncing, step-and-repeat operations, copy and paste and other techniques to speed up the creation of animations.
The company says content produced with the program will work on any modern browser, including mobile browsers for Blackberry, Android, webOS and iOS right alongside desktop browsers for Mac and Windows like Safari, Chrome, Firefox and IE 9. Future previews will increase functionality and reflect feedback.
The company is sponsoring a series of HTML5 “camps” for developers in New York City, London, Berlin and Tokyo, and has launched a new showcase of HTML5 capabilities and examples called The Expressive Web to highlight HTML5 and CSS3 abilities and creative uses of them.
System requirements for Adobe Edge on the Mac demand an Intel Core Duo or later and Mac OS X 10.6 or higher. Windows requirements call for a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 processor and Windows Vista SP1 or later.
