What’s it for?
Animate CC is, as the name suggests, designed for any animation job. That ranges from micro-interactions, to banner ads, to interactive infographics. Anyone who spends time putting together app prototypes, animated Dribbble shots, or simply wants to design with motion, will find Animate CC invaluable. A lot of attention on Animate CC will inevitably focus on what’s new, but what I find most attractive is what isn’t. As someone who first picked up Flash 4, many years ago, what excites me about Animate CC is how familiar it is. This is a new application that uses tools I’m already proficient with. What’s more, in addition to Actionscript, Animate CC will accept JavaScript, so the scripts we used to replace Flash animation can now be repurposed as part of a powerful, unified workflow.What’s new?
Animate CC marks something of a renaissance for the application. Feature additions have stagnated under the Flash name in recent years, as Adobe focused on patching security issues, and sought ways to integrate Flash into the new world of responsive design. Animate CC introduces more new features than the last two CS versions of Flash combined. A major update is the ability to resize the stage, anchoring content to any position, streamlining the process of scaling designs. You can now export for multiple resolutions, invaluable for bitmap work. Animate CC also introduces new vector drawing tools, including some astounding new vector brushes that don’t need to be converted to shapes to be edited.![vector_brushes](https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2016/02/vector_brushes.jpg)
![adobe-stock](https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2016/02/adobe-stock.jpg)
![tagged-swatches](https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2016/02/tagged-swatches.jpg)
About those formats…
Arguably the biggest issue for the Flash platform, and by extension Flash Professional, was its reliance on an installable plugin that no one wants to install. Animate CC frees the application from the player by embracing web standards, opening up the whole of the web, including mobile. According to Adobe over a third of the content produced in Flash Professional CC was HTML5, and in Animate CC you can export for HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, 4k video, you can even generate a sprite sheet based on keyframes and animate through them with CSS. Animate CC also introduces .OAM packaging, which is essentially a .zip format allowing you to package up assets to import into other Adobe tools like Muse CC, or Dreamweaver CC. Perhaps the biggest news is that Adobe have learnt the lesson of Flash, and have future-proofed Animate CC by building in export support for as-yet-undefined formats (just in case there’s another revolution around the corner).![oam-packagin](https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/cdn-origin/uploads/2016/02/oam-packagin.jpg)
Is it any good?
[pullquote]if you use Animate CC to add an ill-advised ‘intro’ to your site, that’s on you[/pullquote] Of course, haters gonna hate. Animate CC will inevitably be dismissed by some as “Flash by another name”. However, never has it been so true that a bad craftsman blames his tools: Animate CC exports to web standard formats, it doesn’t require an embedded player, and there are no inherent security vulnerabilities; if you use Animate CC to add an ill-advised “intro” to your site, that’s on you. Animate CC may not be the perfect animation tool, but for the first time in years it feels like appending “yet” to that statement may not be so foolish. Against the odds, Adobe may have succeeded in breathing new life into an application many designers never expected to install again.Ben Moss
Ben Moss has designed and coded work for award-winning startups, and global names including IBM, UBS, and the FBI. When he’s not in front of a screen he’s probably out trail-running.
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