This is pretty exciting. Adobe, at first, seems like an obvious candidate to release such an application but there’s a bit of history here that makes this story interesting.

It was just about a year ago that Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) pretty much dissed Flash as (see Thoughts on Flash, April 2010) being propreitary, a closed system, and to put it bluntly…behind the times.

Steve Jobs

Of course Adobe responded to these claims to defend themselves and their bread and butter application. There was a lot of talk about these two letters for about a month and then it pretty much got swept under the rug. However, over the past 12 months HTML5 has really started to gain in popularity.

So, what’s the big deal? Well, HTML5 allows developers to develop…designers to design…and there’s some happy wiggle room in the middle for either party to get their hands dirty. You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool developer to see and understand how some design elements are being animated/manipulated/etc. And you don’t have to be a macchiato sipping, NPR listening, IKEA shopping designer to see how you can make “code changes” under the hood.  So there’s this middle ground where the two camps can see each other, agree on a development approach, and in a pinch…help each other out.

Adobe releasing Edge seems to be a bit of humble pie for them. It kinda’…sorta’….does all the same stuff that Flash does, it just does it in a standards-compliant, open-platform approach. I’m going to download the preview and play around with it this weekend. I’ll post a screencast or two when I’m done and let you know what I think.

Even though the release of Edge is interesting, I’ve been less than impressed with a lot of these tools lately. I think it lets a complete amateur get in and make some fun designs, but when it comes to meeting the needs of a client…you have to understand what’s going on underneath the hood or you’ll soon paint yourself into a corner.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/

Check out Mashable.com’s take on this announcement here -> http://mashable.com/2011/08/01/adobe-edge/