Adobe Launches "Adobe Edge" - HTML5 Animation Tool

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/?v=2

by dglassan • 15 years ago

102 55 15 years ago

labs.adobe.com

maxogden• 15 years ago

demo: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/resources/ferriswhee...

vnchr• 15 years ago

Thank you. That was all I wanted to see on Adobe's site, but it just provided more bullet points. Why not advertise what your advertising with your advertisement?

chrischen• 15 years ago

Here's a company doing something similar: http://www.tumultco.com/hype/

Seeing as how Adobe has interests in the prolongation of Flash, I'm not sure I'd trust their HTML5 app...

shib71• 15 years ago

It will be interesting to see which does better - the entrenched giant or the agile upstart.

wallflower2• 15 years ago

Entrenched giant will most likely attempt to buy agile upstarts (assuming they get some adopters) by enticing them with the vision of bringing their technology to hundreds of thousands of designers. And a few million. Of course, the vision will be muddied by corporate swamps (Yahoo buying Flickr)

51Cards• 15 years ago

I think the reality is that Abobe isn't stupid. They see the future and are getting on the bandwagon "early" to ensure their place in the HTML5 future is well established.

dglassan• 15 years ago

I see their HTML5 investment as a hedge against the Flash Backlash they've seen recently

cookiecaper• 15 years ago

Adobe makes money from its Flash editing tools, so they probably do not care if Flash is replaced with HTML5 as long as their editing tools for HTML5 become the standard. In fact, Adobe may even be relieved that it looks like they may be able to drop Flash as a primary platform soon, because they obviously have difficult maintaining the plugin.

There's still an opening for Adobe to make themselves the standard HTML5 IDE (as they are the standard photography "IDE") and still reap as much money as they were making from Flash, but without the overhead of maintaining the runtime.

sjs• 15 years ago

It'll be interesting to see how this compares to Sencha. What else is there?

SafdarIqbal2• 15 years ago

Here's another HTML content creation app: - http://radiapp.com/

Here's the HN thread where author announced it: - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2040844

SafdarIqbal2• 15 years ago

Also see author's comment above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832348

joelhooks• 15 years ago

Adobe is a content creation tools company. Photoshop will be around long after Flash is dead and buried.

catshirt2• 15 years ago

cool thing is that it looks like the animation is pretty much generated from a json object (likely generated from the program). not that there's many other ways to do it, but still a nice simple implementation.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/resources/ferriswhee...

padolsey2• 15 years ago

Technically, not JSON.

niyazpk• 15 years ago

Why do you think it is not JSON?

manish• 15 years ago

Was it only in my browser the train was going faster on the inclines than on declines?

lwhi• 15 years ago

I thought the same. The animation does scale quite nicely though, which I found quite impressive.

georgemcbay• 15 years ago

I think this is because (as samwillis pointed out) the rollercoaster is actually going backwards, so the inclines are really the declines and vice versa. Why they are running the animation backwards is another question, though.

AshleysBrain• 15 years ago

This and other tools like Hype seem to generate reams and reams of javascript (that file you linked is ~150kb of mostly repeats and slightly tweaked values). It seems a bit mad to me - is a large complex animation going to end up being a 1mb monolith of javascript?

samwillis• 15 years ago

The rolercoster seems to be going backwards...

hunter4• 15 years ago

Tim Langdell will not be pleased.

sambeau• 15 years ago

Thankfully he has crawled back under his stone since the MobiGames debacle.

Or has he resurfaced and I've missed it?

teamonkey• 15 years ago

This is getting somewhat off-topic but he's back.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-07-28-langdell-judge-...

michaelpinto2• 15 years ago

It's important to keep in mind that when push comes to shove that Adobe isn't afraid to eat their own — as someone who had a shop focused on Director and Lingo I watched then adopt Flash and really shift gears overnight even though they invested a great deal in Shockwave. I'll grant you that was a long tome ago, but they still may have the will to adopt in their DNA...

SimHacker• 15 years ago

That would have been Macromedia eating its own children, not Adobe.

Speaking of eating its own children, can anyone explain why Adobe still sells Premier AND AfterEffects? Why hasn't one eaten the other? Who needs two different video editing programs?

The only explanations I've heard from Adobe apologists and marketers is that one is a blah blah blah tool, and the other is a blee blee blee tool. But users need to both blah blah blah and blee blee blee blee, and there's no reason to switch between two different programs, or that one program can't both blah blah blah and blee blee blee.

I think the real reason is that Adobe makes more money with selling two different products instead of one.

Adobe should eat more of their children.

mortenjorck2• 15 years ago

Premiere is an editing suite. After Effects is not an editing suite, rather a compositor and motion design suite. I can understand if the distinction is lost on people who have never used the latter, but trust me, it is not lost on motion graphic designers.

You might be surprised to learn that even Apple sells separate editor and compositor software: The just-released Final Cut Pro X is a separate product from Apple Motion.

I do agree, though, that Adobe should consider merging apps when appropriate.

yardie• 15 years ago

Visually, they may look the same with an empty project but they are completely different products. One is a compositor and the other is an nonlinear editor. The only thing they have in common is the timeline. You can do some basic editing in AE and you can do some basic compositing in Premier. But like all pro software the devil is in the details.

talmand• 15 years ago

I'm sorry, one product IS a blah blah blah tool and the other IS a blee blee blee tool. Some users do in fact need blah blah blah blah and blee blee blee blee at the same time but not everyone needs both, hence two separate products.

Yes, Adobe does make more money on two separate products but that's not necessarily the reason for doing so. I guess Adobe makes more money by not implementing Photoshop features into Dreamweaver as well.

DanOWar• 15 years ago

Mac download: http://trials.adobe.com/pub/esd/labs/edge/edge_p1_install_ma...

Stuk2• 15 years ago

After seeing the demo I thought this was being done in canvas, but no, it's actually using css transforms applied to DOM elements. SVG is far more suited to this task.

Also despite it's vector look, all of the lines are in fact pngs http://wwwimages.adobe.com/labs.adobe.com/cdn/technologies/e... . Disappointing.

planb• 15 years ago

As far as I know, webkit supports hardware acceleration for CSS transforms - so maybe that's the reason.

edtechdev• 15 years ago

also, svg still isn't supported on some browsers, including every android phone (android < 3.0)

A bigger questions is, how much are they going to charge for this.

dangoor• 15 years ago

I haven't looked at the browser support for Edge animations, but I'm guessing they're supporting earlier IEs, which limits what they can do.

It would be cool if they had a switch to render for only modern browsers.

pavlov• 15 years ago

Shameless plug -- I'm making a HTML5 animation tool called Radi that outputs to canvas for realtime rendering. It also supports the <video> tag, so you can seamlessly mix vector graphics and pre-rendered video.

It's available as a free beta (currently Mac-only): http://radiapp.com

Stuk2• 15 years ago

Looks very interesting, it would be great if you could put a video of the app in action on that page. I don't have a Mac so I can't try it out myself.

icode• 15 years ago

"Download and install the Edge Preview"

This is so pre internet.

shrikant• 15 years ago

No, this is: [on clicking the "Download" link]

Please log in with your Adobe ID or create a new account to download the Adobe® Edge Preview.

WTF?

wenbert• 15 years ago

I immediately closed the window. I spent a few seconds looking for a "skip" link though.

iaskwhy• 15 years ago

And also the present, right? It's interesting how things are always changing.

wallflower2• 15 years ago

Anyone remember Macromedia Fireworks v1.0? For a preview version, this is a good start. Try to extrapolate to when this might be in Adobe CS and include support for Actions macro recording and seamless roundtrip Illustrator asset embedding.

I believe the power of Adobe is in the Creative Suite integration and ecosystem. This is just a standalone technology preview...

tomelders2• 15 years ago

Oh dear lord no. This is a bad move.

andybak• 15 years ago

Explain?

And if your only answer is 'ads and crappy splash screens' then think a bit more deeply before you respond. People round here'd like a little bit more insight than a simple kneejerk reaction.

Maci• 15 years ago

I'll bite.

I think the "fear" is that once a non-web weary designer get's going with this there will be absolutely no regard for performance impact since it will render fine on what ever pimped up work station is in use.

Meanwhile on platforms with lesser hardware where the browser does not have a full hardware render pipeline the performance will likely be even worse then flash.

In fact, with the ferris wheel demo Safari eats 10% CPU time, Chrome 30%, Firefox 50% on a single core. System: OS X 10.6.8, GF 9400M.

Next thing to happen: "Disable javascript / css to save battery life on your device". :)

tomelders2• 15 years ago

Im genuinely surprised that you'd even ask. Does no one see to the horror that is Flash in this things lineage? I guess not, so here's my thoughts...

First of all, don't dismiss ads and crappy splash screens out of hand. They're a cancer that the web is still undergoing serious therapy to remove. If this gains any traction, the cancer will come back, only this time it will mimic "standards" making it much harder to kill.

Content Hierachy will be thrown out the window. We can talk all we want about web standards and accesibility, but the keystone to it all is content hierarchy. Up to now, we've never really had to sell the concept, which is good because it's a difficult concept to sell. The attraction of being standards compliant, running on iOS devices and meeting accessibility requirements was enough to create a situation where the importance of content hierarchy was ensured.

The wrong tool for the wrong job: As with Flash, this thing will be great for some things. But as with flash, people will use it as an über tool for designing and implementing entire sites. I'm not going to list the reasons why that's a bad idea because you should know already.

Adobe, given half the chance, will push this to be a "complete" design and development tool, because that's their business. That's the type of software they make. Attempting to replace flash with HTML5 is an insanely stupid and destructive errand. And make no mistake, this is the intention.

Then there's the Amateurs, people who will forego learning the fundamentals and start knocking out half baked web sites built with this monstrosity. Dreamweaver is bad enough at enabling the talentless to inflict their creations onto the world, but this thing is going to be too much for people to resist. I'm talking about the kind of people who don't think much beyond whizz bang zippy animations. People who are essentially Magpies. You know they exist.

And then there's Adobe, who haven't made a decent product since PS6. I use Adobe products every day and have done for almost two decades. They're the worst applications I have on my system and I avoid them whenever I can. Now it looks like there will be another one I have to put up with and I don't relish that thought.

I've been designing and developing websites for more than 14 years now. I'm quite good at it too. I've worked in small agencies, big agencies, small corporations and big corporations. I spent my early years working exclusively in Flash. I believed in it, I though it was the future and I'd have fought in a holy war with anyone who didn't think flash was the best of the bestest things ever!

I was wrong. I was idiotically, stupidly and arrogantly wrong to the point of absurdity. If only we knew then what we know now.

I've seen how this movie ends, they all drown in a sea of pre-loaders.

poundy• 15 years ago

The demo works well on the iPhone4 http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/resources/

splatcollision• 15 years ago

Good work Adobe, it's important to prepare for the future. Sucks they couldn't make it a web app, then it could run on my iPad.

leon_• 15 years ago

That's pretty cool. I'm a programmer and have 0 clue about animation and design - but the UI makes it pretty straight format for me to create some primitive animations. (Which I can then include into my Mac app via a Webkit view).

tambourine_man• 15 years ago

CSS3 is hardware accelerated on iDevices. AFAIK, it's the only way to get smooth animations on paltry hardware like this 3G iPhone. And those demos sure look smooth here.

mortenjorck2• 15 years ago

Here's one area where Adobe can really innovate in standards-compliant animation tools: Automate preloading.

Every "look at this doodad made in HTML 5!" demo I've seen betrays its technology in the loading. Bits appear here and there, images load one by one; no matter how solid the execution may be, it feels brittle watching it load in, unlike a Flash app that loads first, then executes.

There's no reason Adobe can't build in a simple loading spinner that hides the DOM construction as a piece of dynamic markup loads. It would go a long way toward making the content that Edge generates feel robust.

Adobe Launches "Adobe Edge" - HTML5 Animation Tool

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