Adobe Edge HTML5 Web Motion and Interaction Design Tool Launched

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. Edge is ideal for visual, web and interaction designers who want to energize their content for the web with movement and transitions.

Edge is a standalone software application that works independently of other tools. Graphics that are created using Adobe Illustator, Adobe Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop can be added to your composition in Edge. HTML documents using CSS-based layouts created in products like Adobe Dreamweaver can also be opened in Edge.

Edge is currently in public preview and is designed to be powerful yet approachable and easy to use. Edge Preview is a complimentary download on Adobe Labs.

Edge Preview 1 focuses primarily on animation and motion, with upcoming previews featuring additional creative capabilities and functionality.

Features:

• 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.

System Requirements

The minimum system requirements for the Edge Preview are as follows:

Windows

• Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor
• Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1; or Windows 7
• 512MB of RAM
• 200 MB of available hard-disk space for installation
• 1280×800 display with 16-bit video card
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services and to validate Subscription Edition (if applicable) on an ongoing basis

Mac OS

• Multicore Intel processor
• Mac OS X v10.6 and v10.7
• 512MB of RAM
• 200 MB of available hard-disk space for installation
• 1280×800 display with 16-bit video card
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services and to validate Subscription Edition (if applicable) on an ongoing basis