I downloaded Edge Preview today, the beta version of Adobe's latest web development app. It's clearly a beta, a lot of tools and controls are incomplete, but it looks very promising.

Just like with Flash, you can create web animations, but it exports to HTML5 and javascript instead of requiring use of Flash player. That's supposed to be better, and it actually might be better if only the browsers would all catch up and include HTML5 compatibility. Riiight. And some day we won't have to make pages backwards compatible with IE any more. And some day my dog will learn to fly. Let's all hold our breath, shall we?

The timeline controls are sort of similar to Flash, and while I struggled to adapt to the differences, I think this is going to be much more intuitive to a new user. I didn't go deep into the possibilities, or review the code it generates for serious problems (hopefully anything like that will be resolved in the real product release). I just had some fun with it and animated a butterfly, not my best work, but I was just trying to figure it all out. You can see it here:

http://www.krazyawesome.com/butterfly/butterfly.html

If that didn't work for you, go update your browser, you cretin.

You can download Edge Preview for free (though you'll need to log in with your Adobe ID).

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/

On startup, it told me it would be good for 151 days. Hmm, that seems awfully random. 151? The only numerical connection I could make offhand was with Bacardi. And I don't even drink rum.