Adobe Edge   

I've said for a while that the first company to make a decent HTML5 Rich Media editor is going to make an absolute mint. Well, yesterday Adobe launched "Edge"... a decent HTML Rich Media editor...

HTML5 is looking like a very promising technology and could be the first time in history that there is a global standard for information exchange and styling. More important to the success of HTML5, the data that you can now exchange includes rich media such as audio and video, which was not natively supported on its predecessor, imaginatively named HTML 4.

Last year Apple closed the portcullis gates on Adobe Flash on the iPhone, iPod and iPad, instead favouring the magical HTML5 sauce. Now thousands of other companies around the world are getting rid of browser plugins (previously necessary for watching video or listening to audio in your browser) and converging on HTML5 to power the front ends of their online estates.

I recently blogged about Apple's incredible growth in the second quarter of this financial year, which shows Adobe isn't in a position to simple brush off the removal of Flash from the iDevices and must change tack, 'Edge' is their response to the explosion of interest in HTML5 and the loss of their Flash media runtime on iOS.

Adobe Edge was released as a free preview this week, you can pick your copy up (if you're an Adobe account holder, you can get an account for free) at:

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


Anyone who has used Adobe Flash (or Microsoft Expression Blend, in fact) will be used to the 'stage', 'timeline', 'assets' user interface, Adobe Edge works pretty much the same way except the way keyframes work has been improved, there is an automated keyframe recording mode, which replaces the repetitive and boring manual task of right-clicking the timeline and choosing "Create Motion Tween" every time you want to do a bit of animation.

While getting to grips with Adobe's new Rich Media development environment I found a great video on YouTube running through the basics of Edge and describes how the new keyframing technique works in practice. So rather than me try to reiterate it, here's the guy behind Digital Nebula getting to grips with the software himself:

A quick step-through of some of the features, including some things missed in the video above such as the secondary play head for creating 'marks', can be seen in Adobe's video below:





Silverlight

What does all this mean for Microsoft and their Flash-rival, Silverlight? It is looking more like Silverlight will have the market to itself soon as Adobe concentrates on HTML5, but much to the dismay of Microsoft, the market that they are inheriting isn't one that wants a plugin-based rich media experience.

Recently Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 and said that HTML5 will be a way of writing native applications for the operating system. Put that knowledge together with the fact that iOS is pushing HTML5 like crazy, and the fact that Mozilla are even talking about bringing out a browser-based mobile operating system, it is looking increasingly likely that if you're not already looking at the technology yourself, then you're really behind the curve.

Silverlight on the Desktop, I predict, will be ditched in the next 12-18 months as new HTML5 editors come out with increasingly tasty features and connected Line of Business apps (Silverlight's last remaining desktop stronghold) switch to HTML5.

Silverlight drives Windows Phones too, however, so there it will live on a bit longer, perhaps 3-5 years as people are upgraded and early adopter developers who have spent good money on their Silverlight apps try to get a return on investment. But then it will die. Anything the iPhone and iPad doesn't support will struggle to work.

I have a hunch that Microsoft are also working on HTML5 development tools (beyond the capabilities already released this June with the Visual Studio Web Standards Update) . The Preview of Edge I downloaded on Monday night says it has 156 days left before it expires, and Adobe have said they will be releasing several more free Previews in the coming months, so you can likely jump on this bandwagon and get some good-looking HTML5 components for your website created with ease and for free before they start charging.

But if that's 6 months away, it opens the door for Microsoft to get there first. How much they charge for their version of Adobe's Edge will be very interesting to see.

For now, it's difficult to beat "free".