Adobe outs un-Flash web animation tool Adobe has released an early incarnation of its new un-Flash web design tool, Adobe Edge. First revealed last October at the annual Adobe Max show in Los Angeles, Edge is a means of building web animations using standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. It's not a straight replacement for Flash – web standards …
They're only responding to market demand from bearded web standards bores, who after years of whinging about flash and grumping about new fangled animation, now find themselves liberated by the html5 w*nkfest to fawn excitedly over over every hello-1995-again sub-flash html5/css3 jerk-o-animation. There are at least half a dozen other html5 animation apps in various stages of beta by the likes of sencha.
Hey standardistas, you wanted html frippery and now you're gonna get it ladled to you in massive glowing, flickering and unblockable spoonfuls, adobe or no adobe.
Yeah, I wanted frippery, and I'm glad I now have it.
But I have to ask why you (and people like you) bother with whichever modern browser you're using. If you just want text, use lynx. If you want pretty pretty, stop whinging about all the pretty pretty. If the problem is that you think the internet should just work precisely how you want it to with no support for anything anyone else might want ... well good luck with that.
99.99% of humans like a bit of style with their substance.
You're reading my mind, Tony. I saw this new development being hurrahed over at fffff.at -- a supposedly cutting-edge "free internet" artists' site -- of all places. The current entry at their site right now is a gushy, jeans-creaming rave over Adobe Edge. Over on the Twitter Machine, I replied to their raving tweet with words to the effect of "oh, great, another annoying-assed ad delivery system".
Well, here's hoping the AdblockPlus upgrade comes soon... _very_ soon.
this looks like a good move. My only reservation is Adobes track record on security. I could be wrong but I expect that creating such web animations in a text editor and Gimp will be a much more secure alternative. Nice of them to provide this for free though.
I am sure that it will be just as easy to block this kind of advertising as it is to block flash, just block the ad servers. This is much more efficient that blocking individual ads anyway.
"I expect that creating such web animations in a text editor and Gimp will be a much more secure alternative"
I don't follow your reasoning here. The creation tools presumably run locally and merely generate data files that you add by other means to your web-site. You can make this process as secure as you like, since the PC that generates the files needn't have a network connection.
"You can make this process as secure as you like, since the PC that generates the files needn't have a network connection."
That's not the point. Program generator code is long winded and messy— just try looking at the source of an HTML file produce by word-processor. It's not the PC generating code that will be insecure but every browser that subsequently has to render the generated code.
If you *want* to produce pages that attack the end-user's browser, you don't wait for a program generator run by someone else to have a bad day. You create your own pages using hand-crafted code.
Moving away from flash means that end-users are no longer subject to weaknesses in Adobe's rendering of flash documents. They are instead only subject to the weaknesses in their browser's rendering of HTML5 documents. Such weaknesses exist, but we have a choice of browsers and nearly all of them fix problems faster than Adobe.
"What we've been doing for a long time is focusing on our runtime: Flash. And because the HTML5 ecosystem wasn't really moving, we weren't doing a lot there," Gubbay says. "But over the last couple of years, there's been a tidal wave of change [with HTML], and as a result, as we've been listening to customers, we've committed to doing more in the browser."
translation:
"we thought we had the power to keep everyone to be locked into Flash forever but in the end Steve Jobs showed us we didn't so we had to get with the program."
...but you must be really high on the Jobsian Kool-Aid if aren't joking here:
"translation:
"we thought we had the power to keep everyone to be locked into Flash forever but in the end Steve Jobs showed us we didn't so we had to get with the program.""
YEAH, because Steve Freedom From Porn Jobs commands such a hold over what's going on the web, rrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiight...
... you Apple shills are really boring, I'm sure you know that.
FYI the web is FULL of Flash-based content and iOS-only content is literally nonexistent compared to Flash.
Yeah I know, it sounds very weird when you compare it to the Jobsian bubble your're living in but it's actually true.
Of course, for you to notice this would require to ditch that useless iOS-crap you are using to run pricey apps, only to get the same content/do the same things we can get/do for free on any device running any proper, current OS (Android, linux, Windows, OS X, literally anything other than iOS.)
This crazy RDF-talk just reminded me how the Puritan-In-Chief was heralded as the savior of the printed press after the iPad announcement - and how it turned out to be the complete opposite: more expensive but a lot less digital content with 30% or more Apple-cut on these already miniscule subscrition numbers...
I'm not supporting his Steviness and I'm not a fanboi. Jobs has very little power over over what goes on on the web. He does however control access to the eyes and ears of a significant proportion of the type of people who are willing to spend a lot of money on unnecessary and overprice gadgetry. The early adopters. The sort of people who would be attracted to silly over-animated adverts for tat. The iPad crowd is made up in a large part by people who have money and spend lots of it on themselves.The sort of people advertisers want to reach. Steve Jobs controls the iPad crowd.
Is flash really so good that it is worth using it even though the iPad crowd won't see it? Of course not. Better to shift to some other technology that will be visible to both the iPad crowd and everybody else.
cause at least it'll produce the animated code for websites, not just adverts, most likely it'll be very low standards, or very "weird" but I think that it'll be great for knocking up a graphical representation of what you want, which then lets you, depending on your skill level, go into the output and optimise, change, "fix" etc.
This is a tool that would help a lot of people move away from flash....
While it may be a rival for Flash (and probably won't drop LSOs on your computer), it'll be interesting to see (a) how long it remains free, (b) if the free version turns into shareware / freemium [i.e. basic functionality for free, pay for increased functionality], (c) how 'clean' the code is. If pseudo-WYSIWIG HTML editors are anything to go by, it may do the job you require, but the code will be horrendously mangled, do lots of stuff you don't expect it to, and take 30 lines of code to do what could theoretically be done in 3 (OK, slight exaggeration there, but if you've ever looked at the HTML code spat out by almost any pseudo-WYSIWIG editor, you'll know what I mean)
Going by the installer, which has "Adobe Creative Suite" all over it, they're targeting this as part of a future version of CS. (ie CS6.x, CS7.x, or whatever)
For the "free", it's probably the _Preview_ releases that are free. Once it's mature, it'll probably have a price and be part of the CS suites, as per normal.
I should think so - it doesn't actually do anything.
If you can write html you can do any of that stuff without some Adobe tool getting in your way and then ending up with files a hundred times larger than they need to be cos of all the pseudo-proprietary crap and tons and tons of standard generic code specifying default values they will bung in just to start with.
If it ends up being only as bad as MSWord doc>html tool I would be very surprised.
Hopefully HTML5 will signal the beginning of the end for Flash - now lets get PDF firmly in the sights.
It is so blinding obvious that there is a huge market for "rich" and bloated media ads, that it is just a matter of time before some company comes along and delivers an HTML5 kit in the space where Flash is banned.
@The people writing comments like "So now instead of annoying flash ads we'll get annoying HTML5 ads. Thanks, adobe." ... Do you *really* think that if Adobe didnt make this product now, nobody else would later?
I'd much rather things were rendered in HTML. Be it media rich sites, or adverts or whatever. At the moment Flash is by far and above the least stable, least secure thing that runs on websites (nobody uses Java), so by taking the rendering engine away from Adobe and making it part of the browser, are we not instead going to get a safer, more stable web? And perhaps in time it'll be conceivable to not have flash running and still enjoy all of the web?
...and made an animated, dancing logo under 30 seconds And I'm not a web guy (and yes, this also means it is absolutely ugly and lame.))
It is pretty basic, kinda rudimentary right now but if you ever used any kind of timeline/keyframe-based editor/cg/comp/design tool you are fine already - and that's a huge thing if you want to make the transition a lot less painful and spread it a lot faster than it happened with Flash (though granted, Flash was something new so heads had to be adjusted first back then which is not the case here.)
They need to put in a lot more tools/modifiers to make it useful and make one existing plugin system work inside Edge (instead of creating another one, ahem.) Nevertheless it's promising, I must say.
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