Hi there,
TL;DR: Is there any way for Adobe to open Edge Animate's code now that it has been discontinued, so that it can live on through the community ?
We at Biborg are dedicated to make a better web, and to that end we seek the best tools for web marketing and display.
We were among the many agencies to use Adobe Edge Animate and we loved it, quirks and all.
Since Adobe announced the arrival of Animate CC and the end of Edge Animate, we have been hard at work to make the switch,
but to be perfectly honest, we do miss Edge Animate.
Edge Animate was the best tool to make great web advertising, because it relies on the DOM.
The DOM is lightweight (even when you have to load the Edge runtime to do anything visually cool with it), the DOM is compatible,
and the DOM is (somewhat) stable.
Among the different products we tested that have a similar goal (animating stuff on the DOM), Edge Animate was the best,
it's a tool you can place in the hands of Interactive Designers, Motion Designers and Coders alike, that produces the most stable and compatible
output that we could find.
The disappearance of Edge Animate left the market with a gaping hole, concurrents being sometimes leagues behind in terms of browser compatibility (looking at you GWD) or ergonomics.
What about Animate CC ?
Animate CC has the great benefit of being very similar to the late Flash as far as the Designers are concerned, and the plugin/adaptative backend is very promising,
but until someone creates a target that outputs something other than CreateJS, this just won't do for advertising.
Canvas is no doubt a cool toy, but it is nowhere near the recommended specs for advertising.
Its compatibility is restricted to somewhat recent machines and it still isn't ubiquitous across browsers, devices and OS;
it requires an awful lot more resources than DOM, which if you plan to make lightweight ads for a better web isn't good news,
and if you plan to use vector graphics, which should be the huge benefit of doing canvas, you will soon realize that your code takes up a lot of incompressible space,
again in advertising this constraint is huge as most standard HTML banners are required by publishers to be around 200ko or less.
What would we do with an open-source Edge Animate ? Why does it matter ?
Since Edge Animate has been discontinued, our clients have logically and rightfully began to ask that we move to another technology,
nobody wants to pay for something that will not be supported, even in advertising where your product has a life-cycle of only a few weeks.
Opening Edge Animate would provide the community with the possibility to carry on its support, making it an active project and giving leverage for those who still want to use it
in the numerous use cases where it is still the best technology.
We at Biborg have already taken on the support of the Adobe Edge runtime, creating libraries to patches bugs, adding functionalities and making it an even better tool for our specific use,
we would be glad to see the full technology, including the editor, being opened for us to keep making the best content with the best tools for the right use-case.
I don't have much hope about this request, Adobe still includes the latest version of Edge Animate in its commercial package after all,
but before it becomes really obsolete, now is the time to humbly ask for it.
Thanks for reading,
Renaud (Ron) Bardet