When Written: Aug 2011
Adobe Edge is very much work in progress but is still useful within its limits
Adobe came to the rescue again with a beta of their new design tool called ‘Edge’. Currently this can only be used for creating animations using the familiar objects on a time-line interface, unsurprisingly very much like Flash designer. However it has no support for user initiated events ad so cannot be used to design user interfaces yet, but I am assured by Adobe that in future versions ‘Edge’ will be able to, using HTML5 and JavaScript, much like Microsoft’s Blend currently does with XAML (although I have a hunch that the next version of Blend will do this also).
I will leave Tom Arah to delve into the details but one observation was that Edge created a series of library files that had to be ‘included’ on your page. These files can be sizable so the overhead for a simple animation may be considered too high, but for more complex work it has the making of a useful, and it is for now, a free tool. I have often criticised Adobe’s web design product, Dreamweaver, in the pages of this magazine. This product whilst is excellent in many ways, particularly for the web coder is, I feel, starting to look rather long in the tooth. There is little in the way of interactivity in the design process with testing still being done within a browser, and its preview of CSS styles in the style dialog box has been a bit of a joke for some time.
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton