Adobe Edge Animate

~ the obit ~

i missed edge animate. by 2011 i was an engineer doing other work, not building banner ads or making microsite animations, so the part of the adobe catalog aimed at flash refugees was outside my use case from the start. the people who needed it were interactive designers at agencies on the us side, sitting in front of a clock that said flash had three years left on chrome.

adobe announced edge as a preview on august 1 2011 under the simple pitch that it would let you build the same kind of motion-heavy banner you used to make in flash, but as html5 with css3 animations and a bit of jquery under the hood. the preview pulled fifty thousand downloads in twenty-four hours, which sounded healthy at the time. version 1.0 came in september 2012 as part of creative cloud. by mid 2014 the product hit 2.0.3 and then went quiet.

in november 2015 adobe posted a faq saying the whole edge family was being shelved. edge animate, edge reflow, edge code, edge inspect. the message was that capabilities would be folded into animate cc and dreamweaver, with some of the design-tool pieces going into the new xd. by september 2019 the install was gone from creative cloud entirely. flash itself made it to the end of 2020 before being officially turned off in browsers, which meant edge animate had managed to outlive its own product roadmap and die before the platform it was built to replace.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

edge animate had a flash-like timeline panel and a stage where you placed elements, but everything underneath compiled to plain html plus css and javascript instead of swf. you could make a 300x250 banner that animated in the browser without a plugin, which in 2011 still felt like a real technical achievement. the output ran on ios devices that had no flash support, which was the whole reason adobe was building it.

the file format was edge's own json-based.an structure with a separate runtime that loaded the animation on the page. by 2013 a lot of agencies had built workflows that included it. by 2015 most of those workflows had moved to greensock for code-first animations or to css keyframes for simple ones. edge animate sat in a middle position where designers found it less flexible than just writing the css and developers found it less precise than writing the js.

~ the cracks ~

the immediate problem was that flash had an entire generation of designers trained on its scripting model. actionscript skills did not transfer to javascript, which meant the people who were supposed to migrate to edge animate had to learn a new language at the same time they were learning the new tool. most of them either learned javascript proper and stopped needing edge animate, or stayed on flash until banner ad networks finally dropped support for swf.

the slower problem was that the digital banner ad as a creative form was already dying. by 2014 most ad budgets had pivoted to in-stream video and to facebook's own creative formats, with the older rich-media banner format taking the rest. the animated banner that edge animate was perfect for was a category in long decline. adobe was building a better tool for a smaller market every year of development.

~ how it actually ended ~

the november 2015 announcement was not a single death moment so much as a slow phase-out. adobe told existing customers they could keep using their installed copy as long as it ran on their current operating system. no new features, no bug fixes past 2.0.3. by 2017 the runtime started having issues on newer browsers and adobe was suggesting that anyone with active edge animate projects export them to animate cc, which produced a different output format that required reworking the animation logic. by 2019 the application was pulled from creative cloud and the only way to install it was if you happened to still have a local copy of the 2014 installer somewhere.

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