Adobe, best known for its Flash animation tool used in a ton of web videos, games and other web animations, has announced that it has released a preview version of an all new product, Adobe Edge. The press release for the new Edge product states that Adobe is releasing a preview version of Edge, even before the software reaches its normal beta phase, in order to get more user feedback on the product. The preview is now available to download at Abobe"s Labs web site.
The preview launch is significant because it shows that Adobe is serious about breaking free from its Flash-based roots in developing animation and other features for web sites. While Flash-based animation is still used on a large number of web sites, Apple has been highly critical of Flash in the past. Its highly successful iPhone and iPad devices cannot run Flash-based animation and videos when its Safari based web browser encounters them. On the other hand, tablets and smartphones that are based on Google"s Android-based operating system have promoted the fact that they can run Flash-based web sites and animations.
However, the preview version of Adobe Edge now allows web designers to create web sites via a graphical user interface that will work on other web standards such as HTML5 and others. This first preview version of Adobe Edge concentrates on creating animations but a report on News.com says Adobe will add other features over the coming months. The final version of Adobe Edge is expected to be release sometime in 2012.