Last Tuesday I was invited to join the Adobe CreateTheWeb tour in London. Adobe just announced and released a bunch of promising Edge suite tools for web designers and developers so I was expecting a great event to come…
And I had not been disappointed by Adobe. After my re-eye flight to London I met Jay and Sven in Heathrow. Rodney, Hans and Christian were already at the venue when we arrived at Vue Cinemas where the event took place. We finally met many more people from the web development community from all over the world and had interesting conversations.
Remarkable were the sessions at CreateTheWeb. While there was a generic introduction on why and how Adobe changed its mind about the OpenWeb and now joins the line of OpenSource and Open web development.
Edge Suite
But the other sessions showing the new tools of the Adobe Edge suite were pretty mind-openers for me. Before that I just thought Adobe Edge Animate is just another standard tool. But with all the other Edge apps like Inspect, Reflow and Code (known as Brackets) the company made a cool move to a better web-developer experience. That's because the tools are tiny and very useful.
Edge Inspect
Most of you might have already heard the Adobe Shadow tool which is now renamed to Edge Inspect and offers a great help to test and debug on many devices with aut-reload, remote inspection etc. And you can also extend with Remy Sharps jsbin and jsconsole. Unfortunately you can only set up to 2 connections at a time if you use Edge Inspect with a free CreativeCloud membership. Otherwise you need to pay $10/month or $50/month for the whole app-suite. But I already have the full membership and think it's totally worth the money.
Edge Reflow
And there is this new tool called Edge Reflow. It is not available already but there will be a beta in a few weeks ready to try it out. And it looks awesome for all of us. That is because it is a tool for designers who don't know much about HTML and CSS. But it offers a way to build responsive prototypes directly in HTML/CSS on a design basis ("WYSIWYG"). And it does a fairly good job looking at the output code. Sure there are still some bugs and not many features yet but it is already looking as promising that many web developers said:
Release reflow already. People need tools to help them with the imaginative component of responsive layout #CreateTheWeb Rodney Rehm
Brackets / Edge Code
There is one tool that already had its fame some time ago. When Adobe released Brackets on github they didn't say anything about it and still it was a TOP10 github repo for several weeks!
That is because this software is such a great project by different views: It is fully open-source. It is from developers for developers and with developers. It is a code editor written in HTML, CSS, JS for HTML, CSS, JS which makes it pretty usable and extendable. And it has some cool features like inline-cross-editing, inspection, live reload in Chrome etc.
The history of web technologies
This was the most inspiring and best talk for me on this day. Divya Manian told a story about how the web evolved with more and more technologies like CSS3, WebGL, etc.. And the slides telling the story were fully interactive and created a wonderful atmosphere in the room. I think everyone was just fascinated by this talk.
Finally we had this amazing after-party with all the speakers and this lovely city-view:
And here is a video-summary of CreateTheWeb in London: