Edge is scheduled for release in 2012 but Adobe is making it available to its user community at this early stage in order to gain feedback to help tailor it to meet customers' requirements over the coming months when more creative capabilities will be added.

It has a timeline-based interface which draws on interface elements from other Adobe tools such as After Effects and Flash Professional. It enables new compositions to be built from scratch using basic HTML building blocks, text, and imported web graphics and be manipulated with transformation and styling options.

Edge is intended for advertising and simple animations for new compositions or existing CSS-based page layouts. Based on the open source WebKit rendering engine Edge supports JavaScript, JSON, HTML/HTML5, CSS, web graphics including SVG and jQuery-based animation framework.

It isn't intended as a replacement for Flash and Adobe points out that Flash will still be required for content such as games and multimedia applications. However, given that Apple banned Flash from its mobile devices in April and Microsoft is so aggressively adopting HTML5 and its associated web standards the longer term future for Flash seems uncertain and so Adobe's move to provide an alternative toolset for its developers seems to be a sensible one.

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