It’s always exciting to see what’s going on with web content and its development. That said, it was a no-brainer to RSVP for PDX Web & Design’s presentation of Adobe’s 2012 Sneak Peek. The demo was an extension of Adobe’s “Create the Web” Tour. Ecotrust provided the gorgeous venue: a warm and brainy refuge from a chilly PDX evening.

Adobe’s Serge Jespers and Garth Braithwaite presented a look at Adobe Cloud Services and its Edge tools. The Edge suite are all free to use and are live: go… play. The free set of tools empowers developers and designers the ability to easily create content that’s mostly device agnostic (darn you, older IE versions) and responsive.

I couldn’t stay for the whole event, but it was interesting to watch Jespers start to build a piece of animated web content in minutes using Adobe Edge Animate.

Yeah, it looks a lot like Flash…but exports content into HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript. It’s nuts, in an exciting kind of way. The rest of the Adobe Edge suite add all kinds of other functionalities, like adapting content to multiple devices, providing rich web fonts and other goodies that I’m not too familiar with and may be totally misrepresenting. Once again, check out the site for more information and to play!

Thoughts from a content strategy point of view...

  1. Resource management for production: In some cases, these tools can greatly reduce the production time for certain types of content for nimbler organizations. This could mean opportunities to invest resources elsewhere within a project if Adobe Edge tools are a good fit with the development infrastructure.
  2. Where does it live? The Edge Animate example that I saw looked like it could fit into a page template on an existing site as its own asset. That seems easy enough to inventory and plan for. It also indicates the need to adapt content structuring to Adobe's specific kinds of HTML output, if this is a tool that suites a particular project.
  3. Classification & Taxonomy: I saw a bit of proprietary naming and numbering when we peeked at the source code for the content and an interesting amount of content generation upon "publishing." The app generates quite a few assets to animate one .bmp, some text and a background. It looks super intuitive to generate content, but how about to manage in the long-run? Some food for thought.

Yeah, I know. The demo was fun and exciting and shows off Adobe's push towards a making everyone use Edge and their Cloud Services.

So, why so serious, Andrew?

It’s just stuff to think about, is all. I’m sure at my smaller organization, we’ll probably want to utilize such tools when creating short-term content. It’ll be fun. I honestly can’t wait to play with the tools.

And how about you? What do you think about the new Adobe tools? Will it empower better content?