As of this writing, Animate isn’t yet a commercial project. Adobe offers a free preview so that web builders can put Animate through its paces and provide feedback for the team that’s building the Animate of the future. In spite of its immaturity, Animate, as it is now, can help you build some great animated features for your web pages. One of the things you might find lacking is help and support. This appendix is here to help you get Animate installed and to point out some places where you can find some help. After all, even Lewis and Clark had guides to help them in their explorations.
This section was based on Adobe Edge Animate Preview 7. Your mileage may vary if you’re using a more recent version.
The Preview version of Edge Animate runs in Windows 7 and Mac OS 10.6. That means Windows XP and Mac OS 10.5 and below are not supported. For those of you who are interested in such details, Animate is a 32-bit application but will run on 64-bit machines, too. Adobe has not listed any other requirements, but Animate doesn’t seem to require a lot of processing power or disk space. If your system can comfortably run a web browser and another application, like a photo editing program, at the same time, you won’t have trouble with Animate. The Windows application folder requires less than 100 megabytes. The Mac version comes in under 120 megabytes.
Installation of the Preview version of Animate is fairly easy. The first step is to download the file for your computer from Adobe’s website. There’s a version for Windows and a version for Macs. You need to have an Adobe account to log in and get access to the files. If you don’t already have an account, don’t worry. It’s free. All you have to do is provide the usual information: name, email, and so forth.
If you have an Adobe Cloud subscription, you’ll find Animate listed with the other applications. Installation is as simple as selecting Edge Animate in the Adobe Application Manager tool.
You can find the download links at: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/. The Windows version is a ZIP file. The Mac version is a DMG file.
Double-click the ZIP file. Extract the contents of the ZIP file to the desktop.
Open the folder containing the extracted files, and double-click Set-up.exe.
The Welcome screen appears.
Click Accept to start the installation.
The Install Options screen opens.
Click Install to install Animate or Back to return to the Welcome screen.
The Installation Progress screen appears; when installation is complete, the Thank You screen is presented.
Click Done to close the installer or the Adobe Animate button to launch Animate.
Double-click the DMG file.
Open the Adobe Edge Animate Preview folder and double-click the Install application.
The Welcome screen opens.
Click Accept to start the installation.
The Install Options screen appears.
Click Install to install Animate or Back to return to the Welcome screen.
The Installation Progress screen appears; when installation is complete, the Thank You screen is presented.
Click Done to close the installer or the Adobe Edge Animate button to launch Animate.
When you’re working with Preview versions of a product like Animate, that means sooner or later you’re going to want to uninstall one version and install the latest, greatest version. Often, it’s important to make sure you uninstall completely, or the next version won’t behave well.
Select Start→Control Panel and, in the Programs section, click “Uninstall a Program.”
In the list of programs, double-click Adobe Edge Animate.
The Uninstall Options screen appears.
Click Uninstall and wait while Windows deletes Animate.
To back out now and keep Animate around for a while, click Cancel.
In the Applications→Adobe Edge Animate Preview folder, double-click the Edge Animate Uninstaller application.
Click Uninstall and wait while your Mac deletes Animate.
To back out now and keep Animate around for a while, click Cancel.
Sometimes Adobe applications leave remnants on your hard drive even when they’ve been uninstalled. That can be a particular problem with “preview” applications. The remnants interfere when you install a new version of the same application. If you have these kinds of problems you can use Adobe’s “cleaner” tool to remove those remnants. Follow Adobe’s instructions carefully when using the cleaner utility. You can find the tool and the instructions at www.adobe.com/support/contact/cscleanertool.html.
In the Preview versions of Animate, if you click on the Help menu, you won’t find the usual help system. No 500-page, PDF-style user’s manual. No context-sensitive help items. The fact of the matter is, they’re probably still writing the documentation. In Preview 7, there is a working document called Adobe Edge Animate Runtime API. It consists of a couple of pages of fairly technical details about how Animate works. There are a couple of tips for writing JavaScript code. If you’re new to Animate or JavaScript, it’s probably not going to provide a lot of help. However, Adobe has launched a resource page for web and that’s a great place for beginners to get started: http://edge.adobe.com.
If you have a specific question, you’re better off turning to the Animate community forum that’s hosted on Adobe’s website: http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/edge/. You need to use your Adobe ID to log in, but you already have that if you downloaded Animate. What you’ll find in the forum is an active community of Animate fans. Other Animate explorers, like you, post some of their projects and share info about how they work. Post a question, and soon you’ll have an answer—if not a full-blown debate.
A few of the books in the Missing Manual series cover HTML, JavaScript, and jQuery: HTML5: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald (O’Reilly); CSS: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland (O’Reilly); JavaScript and jQuery: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland (O’Reilly); and Creating Websites: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald (O’Reilly).
Head First jQuery by Ryan Benedetti and Ronan Cranley (O’Reilly) also serves up a great introduction to jQuery coding. If you’re looking for the Bible on JavaScript, turn to JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan. Just be prepared for some serious technical detail.
There are a number of non-Adobe resources for help with Animate, JavaScript, and jQuery. Do a Google search for “Adobe Edge Animate,” and you’re likely to find web-sites where people post examples and maintain blogs that discuss Animate. Darrell Heath, this book’s technical reviewer, has just such a site at: www.heathrowe.com.
For help with JavaScript, you can turn to www.w3schools.com/js or https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript.
The official jQuery website provides tutorials, forums, and lots of ways to learn. Here’s a link to its tutorials: http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials.
Chris Grover, the author of this book, has a website at www.edgemanual.com. The site displays working examples of some of the projects in this book. It also provides hints, tips, and how-to projects not covered in the book.