Big question: what do you think of Adobe Edge?

Having said that, I’m starting to think there’s a place for some types of CSS animation. To begin with, it’s something that can work cross-browser today (if you fall back to JS-based animation, rather than CSS), which can’t quite be said for canvas and SVG yet. And, secondly, it opens the door to people with DOM and CSS skills to do some surprisingly effective animation, without having to learn complex graphics APIs to make use of canvas.

Adobe Edge, Animatable … What the hell? Seriously, I really don’t get what people are thinking at the moment. The web standards crowd spent years fighting against unnecessary Flash animations, only to come out with our own half-arsed animation tools. This really does feel like the sins of our fathers. I mean, how is rotating and tweening a bunch of divs any more helpful or meaningful than animating in Flash? The only difference is that one required a plug-in (which 90 per cent of the planet had anyway) and was about 100 times more powerful.

It seems to me that we’re simply jumping on the animation bandwagon because we can, and are in serious risk of backtracking on all the great advances in usability we’ve had over the last few years. Every new portfolio site is now going to spin, shake or animate just because it can. Whoopee! Next we’ll all be doing 3D in the browser and trying to design HTML5 games. Oh, no, wait, we’re already there. I think I’m having a flashback and am in need of a bit of a lie down. Wake me up when 1998 is over. I didn’t like it much the first time around, so I’m pretty sure it’s going to suck now.

I always prefer to use handcrafted code to create the fastest and most efficient products. I would consider using Edge, which generates the code for you, for prototyping, and perhaps to work out more complex aspects of animations. If anyone decides to use Edge for production code, I would recommend a full inspection of the output first, along with thorough testing on a range of browsers and devices, including mobile.

Honestly, I don’t see myself using Edge, simply because I don’t trust design apps that output code, especially when writing it myself is typically less time consuming than debugging an app’s generated code. Adobe products are trending more in that direction: design without knowing code (see also Adobe Muse). I’m sure it’s an ever-growing market, but I feel like the company’s gradually drifted away from catering to people who do design and development for a living, opting instead to focus more on hobbyists.

That said, I’m not really bothered that Edge outputs div-based code rather than using SVG or canvas. For the app’s target market – those that want results but don’t understand or care about code – it totally makes sense. Support for SVG and canvas is non-existent in IE8 and below, a not-insignificant portion of the browser market. There’s a lot to be said for something that ‘just works’ without IE code forking. While it would be nice if Edge output professional-grade code, it isn’t an app that will be used by professionals in their day-to-day work.

Until Edge releases additional features and support for canvas, it will struggle to find a foothold as a tool used in serious, professional frontend development environments. It suffers because the industry is divided between super-rich Flash experiences and traditional informational websites that have minimal animation requirements and are geared towards content and accessibility. The traditional sites that comprise the majority of the web rarely require complex timeline animation, and typically only need basic interaction hovers handled by CSS and jQuery. There just isn’t a huge need to be doing complex HTML animations on most sites, and Edge and other tools aren’t yet compelling enough for people to find reasons to try them.

I think it’s great that Adobe is embracing HTML and coming up with tools to help add richer experiences to it. Whether its current implementation is HTML4 or 5 is a little irrelevant to us at this stage – performance is king. Adobe is taking the right approach in allowing itself to make everything it can animatable. We’re sure it will then dive in and work on individual elements such as canvas over time (bear in mind that there are already some very good libraries out there for this, such as EaselJS). Having said that, we haven’t used timelines to create animations in a long time, bar video production; most of our animation tends to be done through code, with optional video effects. This raises the question of who this tool is going to be useful for. I’m presuming Edge will be integrated with Adobe’s other new offering, Muse. There’s great potential for creating some pretty slick content quickly. Whether we can use it for the more complex projects we tend to work on is a different matter – let’s hope people have fun with it!

Thank you for reading 5 articles this month* Join now for unlimited access

Enjoy your first month for just £1 / $1 / €1

*Read 5 free articles per month without a subscription

Join now for unlimited access

Try first month for just £1 / $1 / €1

TOPICS

The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq.

Get top Black Friday deals sent straight to your inbox: Sign up now!

Related articles