When Written: Feb 2013
One company that is making great inroads to building web design tools that release the designer from having to worry about code headaches but still producing standards compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript is Adobe. Having lost the battle over Flash it is turning its expertise and developing development tools that look similar to the Flash environment but which use HTML5 technologies.
Adobe Edge has certainly come of age and with the last release a few days ago has become a set of tools that I would consider using on important web sites. It is amazingly easy to create web based animations through Edge Animate although I would like to see more capability to build user interfaces with it as currently the only objects you have on offer are the usual rectangle, ellipse and text objects. Whilst you could create text boxes and dropdowns and the like from these basic shapes, life is a little short for such exercises! The Adobe Edge range is a set of incomplete tools each one built to do a certain task.
The instant preview of CSS changes capability in Edge Code will no doubt appear in Dreamweaver one day as will the multiple new font capability of Edge Web Fonts. The responsive design tools in Edge Inspect have just been added to the latest update of Dreamweaver CS6 and I am sure that we will see further new toys for web designers from Adobe. I hope.
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton