Adobe has released a new preview version of their HTML-based design and animation tool; and this release comes not only with numerous new features, but also a change in the name of the product. Adobe Edge is now Adobe Edge Animate to better reflect its core functionality.
Adobe Edge Animate allows designers to create powerful animations using web standards. Unfortunately the tool shies away from the powerful new CSS Animations and Transitions and uses JavaScript for those features instead.
The latest preview adds some powerful core features such as percentage-based layouts, CSS shadows support, multi-line text-editing and a lot more. One of the biggest additions to the software however is the new support for adaptable / responsive layouts.
In order to allow designers to create responsive designs a number of enhancements have been made to the interface. Percentage-based layouts, support for percentage-based guides, and a resizeable stage make it easy to continually test how a design scales. A new tool has also been added allows one to apply some standard settings for background position and size.
The timeline has also been improved and now supports changing its granularity.
Another important feature addition is a warning when the features used by project aren’t supported on a current-generation browser.
Currently Adobe Edge Animate is free as it is still in the preview stage. It can be downloaded for OS X or Windows from its Adobe Labs page.
The following video by Adobe highlights the new features of the latest preview release:
