Last month Adobe launched a long awaited preview of its new standards based animation tool branded Adobe Edge, it’s like Flash for HTML. Edge promises to make animating web content easier for designers who are not that code savvy. Because its output is standards based and uses web kit, HTML5 and CSS3 it doesn’t require a plugin so animations will run in any modern browser including Safari on iOS devices like the iPad. I have finally found time to play with the app and am pleased so far with its simplicity. I’m not much at programming or hand coding so this kind of tool is great for me. The timeline interface is easy to use and understand and the properties panel makes tweaking and experimentation efficient. One of my favorite features is that you can open an existing html file in edge and start animating its elements. Pretty much any property can be animated, size, position, color transparency etc. What you will not find in this preview are complex drawing tools, support for creating CSS3 gradations or shadows or the ability to add interactivity but you can add those features to your elements before or after you animate in Edge. The program does not alter your existing html code much either other than adding some Javascript and CSS  include files to the head to manage the animations. Although it’s a limited preview this is already a handy tool for me and I look forward to a more robust release. Here’s an example of a page built in Dreamweaver and animated with Edge with minimal effort. http://design.corneredge.com/