The company, however, has finally realized that HTML5 will one day become the ultimate future. Hence, it has begun investing heavily in it through various software like Adobe Shadow. Now, Edge has been expanded by Adobe to include more tools and services to streamline the web development process. The various tools tackles the task of animating, coding, inspecting and packaging for mobile devices and fits well not only together, but with third party applications too.
During the keynote session at its Create the Web event in San Francisco, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch revealed the company’s bid to help build the future of the Web–Edge Tools and Services, and announced the immediate availability of Adobe Edge Animate 1.0, Adobe Edge Inspect 1.0 (formerly code-named “Shadow”), Adobe PhoneGap Build 1.0, Adobe Edge Web Fonts and a preview of Adobe Edge Code.
Among the various tools and services is a few renamed, redesigned tools, such as Edge Preview, which is being renamed and released today as “Edge Animate version 1.0.” In fact, Adobe Edge Animate takes a key spot as a tool for creating animations for the web. It has an interactive UI based on WebKit in order to provide maximum fidelity across various popular browsers.
Interestingly, the company also confirmed that Edge Animate, which will enable developers to create animated content for web sites using HTML, JavaScript and CSS, will be given away as gratis to encourage adoption by web designers.
Adobe also gave a sneak preview of Adobe Edge Reflow in anticipation of a preview release expected by the end of the year. Additionally, these new tools take all of Adobe’s previous efforts in HTML5 development, and combines them with brand new tools that will help creative and technical minds alike to create innovative Web sites.
“We are excited to put a powerful new set of HTML5 tools into the hands of web designers and developers and can not wait to experience the beautiful websites, digital content and mobile apps they will create,” said Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager, interactive development at Adobe. “We are passionate about empowering creative people to do anything they can imagine with web technologies, which is why we are contributing to the web platform and making the Edge Tools & Services available for free, including the first release of Edge Animate.”
Edge Tools and Services includes the following software:
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Edge Animate: A motion and interaction design tool that allows users to bring animated content to the web using HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
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Edge Inspect: An inspection and preview tool that allows front-end web developers and designers to efficiently preview and debug the final HTML code for mobile devices.
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Edge Code: Is a powerful code editor, built on the Brackets open source project, optimized for web designers and developers working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
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Edge Reflow: A responsive web designing and laying out tool to help users create layouts and visual designs with CSS, the standard for styling HTML content. Reflow takes full advantage of CSS to create impressive designs along with an option to export code to either Dreamweaver of Edge Code.
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Edge Web Fonts: A free web font service for using a growing library of open source fonts on websites and in apps.
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Typekit: A service that gives designers and developers access to a library of hosted, high-quality fonts to use on their websites.
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PhoneGap Build: A service for packaging mobile apps built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript for popular mobile platforms.
The sweeping concept behind this collection of products is to allow the web developers to deliver a polished product, along with making the process of creating said product much more streamlined and simpler.
More importantly, Adobe hopes that these newly announced tools will help developers and creators alike innovate the Web, including four key areas: layout, foundational graphics, cinematic visual effects, and typography. These four areas are central to the evolution of the Web by making it more expressive.
Besides, after the introductory period, it will go back up to its normal $499 perpetual license price. Those who don’t have that kind of money laying around can opt for the much cheaper $14.99 per month licensing fee. For more details, visit www.adobe.com/go/creativecloud.