Section 1: Getting Up-To-Speed
Welcome to Mastering Adobe Animate 2021! This book is divided into three sections, each containing a set of chapters that focuses on a variety of fundamental topics. This first section of the book includes all the foundational and background content you must understand before tackling the more advanced chapters. You'll be introduced to a number of must-know foundational concepts and background information here that will be built upon as we proceed through the remainder of the book.
This section comprises the following chapters:
- Chapter 1, A Brief Introduction to Adobe Animate
- Chapter 2, Exploring Platform-Specific Considerations
- Chapter 3, Settling into the User Interface
- Chapter 4, Publishing and Exporting Creative Content
Chapter 1: A Brief Introduction to Adobe Animate
This chapter provides background information on Animate, what it is used for in the industry, and specifics around the new features in Adobe Animate 2021 and how to put them to use. When new features are released, the software release notes usually just aren't enough, so we'll explore each of the new features in depth so that you can start using them right away, including the new Assets panel, rig management, quick publish options, timeline and symbol features, and even the new capabilities around creating your own in-app tutorials. We'll also cover some resources around keeping up to date with all things Animate. You'll come away from this chapter with a refreshed understanding of Animate as a creative platform for designers, animators, and developers.
After reading this chapter, you'll come away with the following skills:
- Understand the history of Animate and what the software can be used for.
- Learn which features have been added to the software, what their purpose is, and how to put them to use.
- Know where to look for new releases and stay abreast of new resources around Animate, related software, and the industry.
Technical Requirements
You will need the following software and hardware to complete this chapter:
- Adobe Animate 2021 (version 21.0 or above).
- Refer to the Animate System Requirements page for hardware specifications: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/system-requirements.html.
Understanding Adobe Animate
Adobe Animate has a lengthy history that is full of growth, accolades, disappointments, crushing defeats, pivots, and at least one notable resurrection. To cover the entire history of this software would take a book in itself, so we'll only touch upon certain, relevant points here. It is important to know, however, that beginning a new project in Adobe Animate is now a unique experience that, without certain decisions by Adobe and obvious passion from the community of users, might not be possible today.
A Bit of History
Animate began its journey as a simple vector graphics drawing program called SmartSketch for use on stylus-based devices developed by a company called FutureWave. It soon gained such popularity that it was made available on both Windows and macOS with added motion capabilities and given the name FutureSplash Animator. The blossoming popularity of the World Wide Web at this time led to the software pivoting to target this young medium through the use of a browser-based runtime.
This was the beginnings of both the authoring software that we still use today and what eventually became the Flash Player browser runtime. The idea was that you could author your content using FutureSplash Animator and play back the content through the web browser using an installed extension, often referred to as a plugin. The capabilities of web browsers at the time were such that HTML was a simple markup language for sematic text declaration and hyperlinks. Technologies such as the current iterations of CSS and JavaScript didn't even exist yet; even image files were barely supported! If you wanted a rich media experience on the web, you had to rely on such browser plugins.
Macromedia acquired FutureWave (and FutureSplash Animator) in 1996 and rebranded the software as Flash – sort of a combination of the two names! They made huge investments in the authoring software and web browser plugin, renaming it to Flash Player. Macromedia was also responsible for the ActionScript programming language and the expansion of the Flash Platform across a number of areas, including web, server, and even small steps into mobile.
From FutureWave to Macromedia and now to Adobe, Animate has changed a lot over the years!
Figure 1.1 – 25 years of Adobe Animate
In 2005, Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia and all their properties (including Flash!) and have been holders of this technology ever since. Under Adobe, we've seen both great strides and seriously missed opportunities over the years.
On the one hand, the Flash Platform was greatly expanded upon under a number of proprietary and open source initiatives, ActionScript 3.0 was released, and MXML/Flex was made much more accessible to many developers. We even had Flash Platform technologies integrated into nearly every piece of creative software Adobe distributes directly within the workspace panels of software such as Photoshop and Illustrator. On the other hand, the push for Flash Player on mobile was so bungled that the platform could never recover from the fallout.
While Adobe did release a number of versions of Flash Player for Android and RIM/Blackberry devices, they were never able to get the runtime on Apple devices such as ...
