Blackspike was asked to help with some animation for Endjin – something we would normally have done in Flash (or less frequently, Silverlight), but the brief was for it to work on mobile, which meant using HTML5/CSS/Javascript.

After looking at various canvas/JS libraries and CSS keyframing, we thought it would be good to give Adobe Edge Animate a spin, as it was new, cross device/browser and surprisingly, free.

For a v1 release, it is remarkably stable. The UI fits in with the great Creative Suite 6 style and is easy to grok on first look.

Also, anyone familiar with Flash’s timeline and Actionscript editor should be able to be productive quickly. The Actionscript is now replaced with Javascript, and works with events just as you’d expect.

The code it outputs is a little heavy handed, but it’s great that you can go in and tweak it by hand after you’ve published for fine tuning – something you couldn’t do with a .swf.

All in all, a very interesting product, it looks like Adobe have created their own Flash killer.