Your prescription for increased productivity and profitability
Ah, September. It’s that time of year that I look forward to here in the Mountain West of the US, when the leaves turn color and the harvest of my gardening efforts begin.
This year there is another reason to look forward to September. It’s the month when Adobe promises to make a long-awaited announcement.
So, until then, maybe we should talk a little more about what was announced last month: Edge Animate Preview 7. Yes, it is still a Preview product. But what was released last month is looking very much like a promising application.
Among the improvements are better support for text and drop shadows. And, once you get a project in Edge to the point that you want to save it for publication, you will find even more reasons to applaud. For me, the Publish Settings panel offers three great reasons for creating animations with Edge.
If you have Edge installed, take a look at the Publish Settings panel (File > Publish Settings). There you will find three modes for saving:
Because Edge is based on web standards HTML, it gives you the ability to animate elements on an existing webpage, and to insert an animation into a web page’s div placeholder. One choice you have in saving for web is the ability to take advantage of Google Chrome Frame for circumventing problems having to do with Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8. (See https://developers.google.com/chrome/chrome-frame for more information.) You can also choose Frameworks via CDN (Content Delivery Networks), or simply publish your content as static HTML.
Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite has become a standard for magazines and large enterprise publications for delivering interactive and animated applications to iPad. Also, if you have been paying attention, you will know there is a Single Edition version which is targeted to the small to midsize design studio and freelance designer. You can read more about this version at www.adobe.com/products/digital-publishing-suite-single.html.
iBooks Author is Apple’s answer for creating books for iPad. It is a template-based application that runs on Macintosh Version 7.0 and above only. One of the widget formats that it accepts is a Dashcode .wdgt file. And, you guessed it, that is the format you get when you save an Edge project using Edge’s iBooks option.
So there you have it: three great reasons to get animating in Edge. Now, I hope it won’t be long before we can talk about what Adobe has in store for us this month.