• Motion paths – Finally!
• Templates that you can save and re-use
• Swipe gesture support for touch devices
• Optimized publishing with CDN hosting, at no cost to you

Check out the features page for more info.

Also, the free introductory offer expires when Animate CC releases next month. To get the new features, you can either subscribe to a Creative Cloud single-app or full membership, or sign up for a free 30-day trial. Here’s our FAQ for more details.

We can’t wait to launch Animate CC and hope you’re excited to try it out. Stay tuned for more updates!

Cheers,

Rich Lee
Sr. Product Marketing Manager

With the release of Edge Animate 1.5 we’re excited to announce the implementation of CSS built-in filters, a cutting edge new spec which enables web developers and designers to bring stimulating visual effects to their elements which could previously only be achieved in design tools like Photoshop.

So what is a filter, exactly?

CSS filters are a powerful introduction to the CSS language, which bring eye-catching visual effects to the web. Backed by hardware acceleration, filters provide a fast and simple way to style your content. But how do they work? Think of filters as post-processing step similar to how you would edit effects in Photoshop. The browser takes a snapshot of the page, grabs the pixel data, styles your elements, and then serves it back to you with the filter effect intact.

Similar to how you can stack lenses on a camera, filters can also be stacked to create unique effects. Combined with the power of Edge Animate, you can achieve compelling animated effects in your compositions.

Keep in mind that CSS filter effects are highly experimental, and are currently only available using the –webkit prefix in Chrome, Safari, iOS6 Safari and Blackberry 10 browsers.

Filters in Animate

Usually when we think of filter effects we think of images. Filters are much more powerful and can be applied to a variety of elements.

In the above example, a filter is applied to a symbol, which in turn applies the effect to the image and text underneath. Translated into DOM-speak, symbols are glorified divs where each sub-symbol is akin to a child div. What makes this special is when filters are applied to the parent div, all the children inherit the style. This includes divs, text, images and other symbol children, eliminating the need to drill down into your symbols to render individual elements.

Before filters, the above effect could only be achieved through layering of multiple graphics. By using filters, you can minimize server requests and reduce your output payload by using a single graphic instead of two or more.

Supported Filter Types

Animate offers support for the following built-in filters:

• Invert
• Hue-Rotate
• Contrast
• Saturate
• Sepia
• Greyscale
• Blur and,
• Shadow

Box/Text-shadow vs. Filter: drop-shadow

Drop-shadow is a valuable add to the filter stack, allowing you to take shadows above and beyond what can be achieved with a box-shadow.

A graphic styled with box-shadow

The above graphic is rendered using box-shadow. Not bad. We have a transparent PNG file, though it’s highly evident the shadow is being applied to the dimensions of the graphic. Box-shadow is a literal rendering of its’ definition; a box-esque shadow is applied based on the current dimensions defined by the container.

The same graphic styled with drop-shadow

This is where the magic of drop-shadow comes in. This effectual property grabs transparent pixel data, and then applies the shadow around the opaque pixels. Since the property is also intelligent enough to pick up translucent pixels, your shadow will also appear behind semi-transparent elements (as opposed to box-shadow, which only renders around the outline.)

Performance

Since built-in filters are GPU accelerated, their performance is fairly stellar considering the processing demands on the browser for rendering. However, be aware that the more filters you implement, the harder the browser has to work, leading to degraded performance. The following table outlines each filter and how you can expect them to perform:

As you can see, filters can add rich effects with hardware-accelerated performance. By styling content leveraging the power of browser rendering, you can optimize your compositions for richer effects with less payload. We encourage you to give filters a shot, and see how they can enhance your Animate projects. If you haven’t downloaded Animate 1.5 yet, be sure to get it here http://html.adobe.com/edge/animate/ while it’s still free.

For more information on other exciting CSS features coming to a browser near you, visit html.adobe.com/webstandards.

Download Edge Animate

CSS Built-In Filters

Up until now, special effects and UI transitions could only be accomplished by stacking multiple images and using transitions to reveal and hide each layer. This increases the payload of your website and forces you to control multiple stacks of imagery instead of a single element. With CSS filters, you can now apply effects which were previously only available to you in image editing software like Photoshop. Filters are especially powerful in Animate and can be used on more than just images. You can apply filters to images, text, divs and symbols.

CSS built-in filters

Since filters are a highly experimental feature, they’re still making their way into all the popular browser channels. Currently CSS filters are only supported in Chrome, Safari, iOS6 and Blackberry 10 browsers, but if you’re targeting a mobile-first experience or want to add some flair to your site with graceful degradation, give them a try.

Gradient Support

Gradients in Animate not only allow you to style your elements, but they’re fully animatable like any other property. This enables you to go beyond typical styling and create some interesting 2.5D effects by emulating light and depth. In this example, I’ve used a CSS filter shadow with a radial gradient to give the illusion of light being cast on the sphere. The new gradients panel allows you to apply linear or radial gradients and adjust the gradient positioning for fine-grained control. You can also choose how a radial is applied based on properties available in CSS by click-holding the radial icon.

Animatable gradients.

Typography enhancements with Edge Web Fonts

No longer do you have to manually juggle code to add fonts to your Animate compositions. Edge Web Fonts gives you access to a vast library of fonts made possible by contributions from Adobe, Google and designers around the world. Edge Web Fonts are powered by Typekit, so you can be assured of high performance and stability. This will make it much easier for you to control typography at production time. Sort your fonts by style and add as many as you want to your font library. The Edge Web Font service is completely free and there’s no limit to how many fonts you can add to your content.

Control typography with Edge Web Fonts.

Check out the above features in action on YouTube.

To learn more about what you can find with this update, visit the Edge Animate release notes. Thanks for using Animate, and we hope you enjoy this update available for download here.

• Added support for Edge Web Fonts
• Performance improvements on published content
• iOS 6 fix for multiple compositions embedded via iFrame and Adobe DPS
• Various fixes to improve application stability

To better understand the features that matter most to our users, this update also includes the ability to report back anonymous data related to the usage of specific features in Edge Animate. This information will help our team make more informed decisions for prioritization and focus on particular features. The Edge Animate team has had a very close relationship with our users during the development of 1.0, and their feedback influenced the product greatly. This update allows you to speak to us through your actions in the application.

To install the update, click on the “Update Available” banner on the EA welcome screen. Download instructions and release notes can also be found here.

Thanks everyone for using Adobe Edge Animate, and happy animating!

Sarah Hunt
Product Manager

Concluding the Preview Period

It’s been a thrilling ride for the Edge Animate team, since we first sneaked an experimental prototype of it at MAX 2010. Less than a year later, on August 1, 2011, we released Preview 1 on Adobe Labs. We really didn’t know how it would be received, but the response was overwhelming — there were 70K downloads on the first day, and major press coverage from publications like Cnet, USA Today, The New York Times, and Mac World. However, the most surprising aspect was that users were already showing off what they made with it within the first 12 hours of launch. It was incredible and flattering to know people had downloaded Preview 1, figured out how to use it, and posted their work on production sites in less than a day.

Looking back, some of us feel that Preview 1 was released too early. It only had a single timeline and couldn’t handle user interactions at all. Just about the only thing you could do with it was create a static, linear animation. There was concern that people would look at the tool and write it off as too basic or primitive for real-world use. We made a conscious decision to release early and often, taking in user feedback to help us improve it. Our development philosophy was very different from what people came to expect from Adobe. In just over a year, we released six more previews. Each release incorporated user feedback and had a mix of major and incremental  improvements to the previous version. There were over half a million downloads during the preview phase, and as I mentioned earlier, the feedback we received was instrumental in making Edge Animate 1.0 what it is today.

Here’s a quick summary of the major enhancements of each Preview:

• Preview 1 (8/1/11) – Single timeline, import graphic files, open HTML files
• Preview 2 (9/7/11) – Fit and finish improvements and bug fixes
• Preview 3 (10/1/11) – Interactivity and access to the Edge Animate API
• Preview 4 (1/19/12) – Symbols, web fonts, element display lifetime
• Preview 5 (3/11/12) – Optimized publishing options, down-level support for non-HTML5 browsers
• Preview 6 (5/10/12) – Built-in lessons, localized in six languages, DPS and iBooks publishing
• Preview 7 (8/20/12) – Resizable layouts, new drawing tools, stage improvements

We plan on releasing more updates to Edge Animate, to add new capabilities as well incorporating more feedback. Stay tuned for more news! With that said, please download Edge Animate 1.0 and let us know what you think!

Thanks,

Rich Lee
Product Marketing Manager

Starting with this release, the name has changed from Edge to Edge Animate. Edge has been renamed to better reflect its capabilities as a tool to create animated, interactive content.

Preview 7 is a major update that our team is VERY excited about. We’ve been hard at work since Preview 6 launched in May, and added a lot of features to make your compositions more compelling and easier to create. Here’s a quick snapshot of what’s new:

• Resizable Layouts: Enable your projects to adapt to different screen sizes.
• Creativity Tools: New ellipse tool, box and text shadows, more robust text editing.
• Stage Improvements: Rulers, guides, resizable stage, and positioning
• Timeline Improvements: Adjust snapping, time-based increments that emulate FPS, visible grid.
• Keyframe Improvements: Lots of improvements were made to make it easier and faster to work with keyframes.
• Usability Enhancements: Grouping, refreshed properties panel, new keyboard shortcuts, and more.
• Updated Code Editor: Re-skinned code tree, updates to symbols, error prompts.
• Accessibility: Publish screen-reader friendly HTML tags.

Our team leader Mark Anders just released a new video that shows Preview 7 in action.

Be sure to check out the complete list of new features here. You can also see all the features we’ve added since Preview 1 launched a little over a year ago.

We hope you’re excited about Preview 7 – please get the complimentary download here and let us know what you think!

Cheers,
Rich

CSS3 is still officially in a draft state. This is why browser prefixes (-moz, -o, -webkit, -ms) have become rampant in web development, and it’s really up to the browsers to decide how they want to implement and render the spec. The challenge for Edge is to try to stay ahead of the game and adapt quickly when things change in a major release.

What went wrong?

With the release of Firefox 14 came a change in the transform spec. Previously the CSS transform spec outlined here had the following syntax for specifying skew:

-moz-transform: skew(30deg,20deg);

It has now been changed to only support the individual axis.

transform: scaleX(sx);
transform: scaleY(sy);

More information on the Firefox animation spec can be found here.

The problem was that just about all Edge animations utilize the transform property, and even if your composition didn’t modify the skew property, the animation would drop the whole transform declaration since it is part of the “transform” CSS property.

How do I fix it?

Our team has devised a remedy for the problem, and it is available today as Adobe Edge preview 6.1.  You can download it from Adobe Labs or via the Creative Cloud. After you install it, all you’ll have to do is resave your project(s) and it will work in Firefox. Alternatively, you can simply swap out the runtime files without having to reload the composition in the app.

We live in a wonderful time where the web is evolving to give us new capabilities, though sometimes that involves some growing pains. Thank you everyone for your patience.

Download Edge 6.1 now.

Recently, I put together a simple project for an Edge user who was having what I would consider a fairly standard problem: he had one timeline, and couldn’t figure out how to use this single timeline to display an arbitrary set of objects.  In his case, he wanted to animate a series of magazine covers for a particular year, and then allow the user to select any year from buttons on his main timeline.  Once the button was clicked, he wanted the existing covers to animate out, and the new ones to animate in.  Now, there are ways to do this on a single timeline, but it seemed like a job for symbols and variables.

This article is intended for novice users of Edge who may not have a deep coding background.

Topics covered in this article:

• getting and setting variables
• symbol timelines
• basic triggers
• basic interactivity
• overflow
• autoplay
• basic animation and easing

The screen shots and project files from this post are based on Edge Preview 6, which is available for free on Adobe Labs or via the Adobe Creative Cloud.

Download the finished project files
See a live example

Creating the First Symbol

Right click after multiselecting to convert to a symbol.

We’re going to first start this project with three mock magazine covers.  Create one rectangle and copy them twice to create three identical Rectangles, then change the name of each one of the Rectangles to something more significant, like “title1,” title2,” and “title3.”  Multi-select these Rectangles by clicking the first one and shift-clicking on the others, then convert all three to a single symbol by using the context menu (right click) to select “Convert to Symbol…”  Since it’s a bunch of red rectangles, name the symbol “red.”  By default, Edge creates an element with the new symbol name and places it on the stage in the same place as your original assets.  It’s critical to remember that a symbol is more like a template or definition – in fact, you can have multiple elements deriving from the same symbol.  That being said, in this project, we will have a single element per symbol.

Now, enter the symbol editing mode by double clicking on the icon next to the symbol’s name in the Library panel.  Once inside this substage, we can begin creating our animation!

You can find the symbol icon under the “symbols” section in the Library Panel, next to the name of your symbol.

Animating In and Animating Out

You can create using the Pin or using keyframes. For more information, see the two lessons about Animation when you first launch Edge.

For a more customized rate of motion, select the Easing button on the Timeline Panel.

For this example, we’re going to begin with a very simple animation of each one of the rectangles zipping in from the right.  With a quick application of easing (easeIn/quad), we have a neat animation in.  I won’t go too much into detail here, as there are video introductions and lessons within Edge to introduce you to animation, using keyframes, and using the Pin.

Move the playhead to a point on the Timeline and press Ctrl-T (Win) or Cmd-T (Mac) to insert a trigger.

At this point, we want the animation to stop and wait for some user input.  Move the playhead to the end of the animation and place a trigger (Ctrl/Cmd-T) at that point.  In the actions pop-up window, type in the command to stop the playback, which is “sym.stop();”  You can also click on the top button on the right side, “Stop,” and it will insert the same code you just typed in.

Now that we’ve animated in, let’s work on the outgoing animation.  Move the playhead to 2 seconds in the timeline and create a transition for each item to the left, once again applying easing (easeOut/quad) to make the animation seem like it’s scooting out to the left.

Once your basic animations are complete, your Timeline should look something like this.

Next, set up reference points within the timeline so we know where our animation starts.  Move the playhead to the beginning of each section of animations and press Ctrl/Cmd-L to create a label.  Name one called “in” and another called “out” so that you can reference them in your code.

Labels help you reference load points on the Timeline.

Adjusting the Visibility

You can find the Autoplay setting on every stage, including the main Stage.

The last couple of things we need to do before we begin adding interactivity have to do with how the symbol displays on the stage.  First, we want to make sure that this symbol doesn’t automatically play – after all, we want the mouse clicks to handle the animation in and animation out.  Since the autoplay setting is checked by default when we create the symbol, change it by clicking first on the stage background to get the symbol properties, then uncheck the “Autoplay” checkbox.

Now that we have our completed symbol, we can return to the main stage and look at the symbol in the context of the stage.  As you can see from the screenshot, you won’t actually see anything directly on the Edge stage. If you select “red” in the elements panel, you can see that the bounding box goes way off the stage to the right.

However, if “Autoplay” for the symbol were set and you were to preview in browser, you might actually see the elements before they begin animating – not good if we don’t want the user to see the assets before they display in the animation.  What we really want is a way for the Stage to be the bounding box for the visibility of the animation – almost like a cropped view.  In order to do this, you should change the overflow setting by clicking on the Stage (anywhere in the window, or on the Stage element in the Elements Panel), and then switching Overflow from “visible” to “hidden.”  This will hide anything that’s offstage, so we get a clean animation in.

By setting the overflow, you can determine whether your animation has scrollbars or simply hides everything that’s off-Stage.

Adding Interactivity

There are other event handlers you can choose, including some meant for touch devices.

Now we’re ready to add in the animation in on a click!  Draw another rectangle on the stage with the same red to be your button, and name it “redButton.”  Once you have it placed where you want it to be, add in a simple response to a click by selecting the actions button, either in the Elements Panel or in the Properties Panel.  You can also right click on the element and select “Add Action.”

Once inside the actions editor, insert the code to reference the symbol and play its timeline from a label:

   sym.getSymbol("red").play("in");

As a side note, getSymbol always refers to the element name and not the symbol name.  In this case, they’re both set to “red.”

At this point, if you preview in browser and click on the small red button, the rectangles zip in correctly.

The Second Animation

Protip: Use the symbol export view to transfer symbols between compositions, machines, or even between two people.

Now that we have an animation in, we can work on the animation out while a second set of rectangles (read: magazine covers) transitions in.  In order to do this, first duplicate the symbol (let’s call this one “blue”) and change the colors of each one of the rectangles by editing the symbol.  Also, duplicate the button to make a blue button as well.  Finally, drag the blue symbol onto the stage, aligning it perfectly with the “red” element on the stage so that it sits right on top of one another.  (Hint: select “red” before dragging blue on stage to align one object on top of the other.)

You can also snap to an object’s side and resize so that it’s the same size as another object on the Stage.

This is the point where we have to do some planning – what happens when the user pushes the second button?  Well, we want whatever is on the stage to animate offstage, and then whatever color button the user pushes to animate onstage.  That should be relatively easy to do if I only have two buttons, but what happens if we have three or more?  The answer is simple: state management.

For the non-programmers out there, you can interpret this to mean: “Where am I?  What’s on the stage right now?”  All you need to do is to create a variable to hold information on what element is currently displayed on the stage.  Then, we can refer to that variable when we do the animate out.

In addition to the compositionReady event, there are other Stage events that can be useful, including keystroke events for better user interaction.

First, let’s start out by initializing the variable when we first load our composition.  The Stage’s compositionReady event is the one I want to target:

   sym.setVariable("current", "");

Since there’s nothing on the stage to begin with, set it to an empty string.

Then, at the end of the code for both redButton and blueButton, add code to set the “current” variable to that color.  For instance, in redButton’s click event:

   sym.setVariable("current", "red");

Now, all that’s left is to check what the current object is and animate that out.  In this case:

   var current = sym.getVariable("current");
   if (current != "") {
      sym.getSymbol(current).play("out");
   }

Our total code in each button should look something like this (for instance, in redButton click):

   var current = sym.getVariable("current");
   if (current != "") {
      sym.getSymbol(current).play("out");
   }
   sym.getSymbol("red").play("in");
   sym.setVariable("current", "red");

So, if the user clicks on on blue and red is already on the stage, red should play “out” and blue should play “in.”

But Wait…!

It seems like we’re 90% there, but there’s one major problem – the animations are running over each other!  In fact, the rectangles are animating in at the same time as the previous set is animating out.  What we really need is a little bit of buffer time before the animation in happens.  Now, there’s code to do this, but the easiest way is to move our animations over and add another second and a half of buffer time in order to allow the animation out to happen before we do the animation in.

Before: You can also move individual keyframes left and right along the timeline.

After: This extra space in our timeline allows for the animation out to occur.

At this point, when you preview, switching back and forth between blue and red looks really good, but the initial click now has a second and a half delay.  Easy enough to handle – we’re now going to add another label called “shortIn,” which doesn’t have the long lead time.  Then, you can insert some code that will play the short intro if we’re at the very beginning (meaning, if current is set to the empty string).

This new label will allow me two options – either to begin my animation immediately or to take a second and a half to begin my animation.

Our total code, then, looks like (in redButton click):

   var current = sym.getVariable("current");
   if (current != "") {
      sym.getSymbol(current).play("out");
      sym.getSymbol("red").play("in");
   }
   else {
      sym.getSymbol("red").play("shortIn");
   }
   sym.setVariable("current", "red");

In my final version, I’ve also included a green button to demonstrate that adding another button doesn’t require a whole lot of work.

Download the final project files here.

Have questions?  Join us in the Labs Forums and search to discover if someone has already asked (and answered) your question, or add a post to ask your question!  Also, check out the Edge microsite, with lots of downloadable goodies and project files.

Preview the sample file.
Download the sample file.

Set up your analytics account

Visit http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign in with your existing account or create a new one.

If you’re integrating your Edge composition with a page that already contains your tracking code, you can skip this step and move onto “Tracking Events in Edge”.

Once logged in, visit the Admin tab to grab your tracking code towards the bottom of the page.

Copy and paste your tracking code into the .html of your Edge composition.

Now that you’re all set up we can begin to track.

Tracking Events in Edge

Event tracking in Edge is actually quite simple. You can track anything bound to an event or have tracking executed automatically via triggers on the timeline. In this example, I’m going to set up event tracking for several events in my composition.

I’ll be using the analytics code for event tracking as documented here using the _trackEvent method. Visit the Google Analytics tracking guide to learn how to use these paramaters.

I’ve set up events in a few different parts of my composition. You can set up as many or as little events as you’d like; I’ve added plenty to give a few examples of events you can track.

Ready to upload

Now that all your tracking code is in place, you’re ready to upload. Once your composition is uploaded to your website Gogle Analytics will start tracking the events. Note: it might take a while between the time the event is fired to when Google receives it.

To view the events on Analytics, Go to Standard Reporting > Content > Events.

Once the events are executed, they’ll appear in your analytics report which allows you to get in-depth analysis on how visitors are using your Edge compositions.

This post will show you how to integrate your Edge compositions into Adobe Muse. Be warned, this does involve some code – BUT – don’t let this intimidate you! If you’re the type that would rather poke a fork in your eye than code, fear not. All we’ll be doing is copy and pasting.

This post also assumes you have the basics of Muse and Edge down and is not a tutorial on how to use either. For resources on how to use Muse, check out muse.adobe.com. For resources on how to use Edge, check out edge.adobe.com.

Getting started

View the Page
Download the sample files

I’ve created a very basic site in Muse which has some simple navigation and a placeholder for the banner I will later create in Edge. There’s two caveats to integrating Edge content into Muse;

1. Integrating Edge compositions requires HTML export out of Muse, and therefore you will not be able to edit your site in Muse once the Edge content is integrated. Make sure your site is good to go before publishing. If not, the process of merging your Edge content is fairly easy once you’ve done it a few times so if you need to change your site, you’ll just have to republish and reinput the Edge snippets.
2. You will not be able to upload your site via Business Catalyst in Muse after you’ve integrated your Edge content, since the site is published as HTML from Muse.

With that out of the way, here is the basic site I created.

Once you’ve completed your site, go to the File menu and select “Export as HTML”.

After you publish, you should see something similar to this in your published directory.

Onto Edge

In this example, I’ve made a simple banner in Edge which I’ll be putting into my Muse site.

Save your Edge composition in the same directory as your Muse published content. Your folder should now look something like this:

And now we code (kind of)

Put down the fork! By code I really mean copy and paste – we’ll be merging the content between the Edge HTML and the Muse HTML.

Open the two HTML files in the directory you’ve been saving your work in.

We’ll start with the Edge HTML. First, copy the following code:

Then switch over to the Muse HTML. Look for the closing </head> tag (there will be only one in the document). This is where we’ll paste the code.

Your Muse HTML should now look like this:

We’re halfway done!

Open up the index.css file that Muse exported. If you’re not familiar with CSS, it’s an output file that works similarly to how styles work in InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop. Muse will export the styles for every element you create defining things like colour, fonts, position, etc.

I know I set my placeholder to 700px wide, so doing a search I can instantly find the name of the placeholder. Make sure the Edge content you create and the placeholder you created in Muse match sizes; if the dimensions are off it can cause your page to style incorrectly.

In this case, the ID of my placeholder is #u141.

Now that we know what the ID is of our placeholder, we can integrate our Edge content. Go back to the Muse HTML page and do a search for your ID. ID’s can only exist once on a page, so it will be the only one you find.

There’s one more line we have to grab from the Edge HTML. Return to the Edge HTML and copy the following line:

Return to the Muse HTML and paste it in between the <div> tags of our placeholder. It will now look something like this:

You’re done! Now your Muse HTML page is ready to go.

Make sure when you deploy your website you include all of the Muse and Edge files.

Since both Edge and Muse are very new products, our efforts have been put into making our individual products better before focusing on cross-product workflows. Edge has already started exploring workflows with other products, including InDesign and iBooks. When it comes to Edge and Muse, is there room for improved integration? Absolutely! However that’s for a future release, as for now you’ll have to get your hands a little dirty to make the two work together.