Adobe announced the immediate availability of an early public beta of Edge, its new HTML 5 editing app for designing Flash-free interactive and animated elements for Web sites. The beta is still in its early stages, so it isn’t feature complete yet, and Adobe plans to use feedback from customers in the development process.
Edge, according to Adobe, works with HTML content and adds animations, motion and interactive elements with HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript. It includes a video editor-like timeline tool for controlling animations, and it supports JPG, PNG, SVG and GIF images.
Adobe Edge is available as a public beta
Adobe sees Edge as a tool designers can use along with its Create Suite applications such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver, although direct import support isn’t available yet. Adobe does, however, have plans to add import support as development continues.
Edge-created content is viewable on any HTML 5-aware browser, such as Safari, Firefox and Chrome, and works on mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad, HP’s WebOS, and Android-based smartphones.
The beta requires Mac OS X 10.6 or higher.
The Edge public beta is available as a free download at the Adobe Labs Web site. The final version is expected to ship some time in 2012.