Edge ReflowI received this morning a message from the Adobe Edge Reflow prerelease forum that triggered my interest. I must admit I did not really follow what happened there during the last twelve months for many various reasons... But this morning, it was different. In short, the author had questions about the fate of Edge Reflow, in particular because of the deep silence of that forum...

Adobe announced Edge Reflow in Q3 2012 I think. It followed the announcement of Edge Code a while ago. Reflow was aimed at visual responsive design in a new, cool, interactive desktop application with mobile and photoshop links. The first public preview was announced in February 2013 and a small community of testers and contributors gathered around the Adobe prerelease fora. Between January 2013 and now, roughly 1300 messages were sent there.

Reflow is a html5/JS app turned into a desktop application through the magic of CEF. It has a very cool and powerful UI, superior management of simple Media Queries, excellent management of colors, backgrounds, layers, magnetic grids and more. All in all, a very promising application for Web Authoring.

But the last available build of Reflow, again through the prerelease web site, is only a 0.57.17154 and it is now 8 months old. After 2 years and a half, Reflow is still not here and there are reasons to worry.

First, the team (the About dialog lists more than 20 names...) seems to have vanished and almost nothing new has been contributed/posted to Reflow in the last six to eight months.

Second, the application still suffers from things I identified as rather severe issues early on: the whole box model of the application is based on CSS floats and is then not in line with what modern web designers are looking for. Eh, it's not even using absolute positioning... It also means it's going to be rather complicated to adapt it to grids and flexbox, not even mentioning Regions...

Reflow also made the choice to generate Web pages instead of editing Web pages... It means projects are saved in a proprietary format and only exported to html and CSS. It's impossible to take an existing Web page and open it in Reflow to edit it. In a world of Web Design that sees authors use heterogeneous environments, I considered that as a fatal mistake. I know - trust me, I perfectly know - that making html the pivot format of Reflow would have implied some major love and a lot, really a lot of work. But not doing it meant that Edge Reflow had to be at the very beginning of the editorial chain, and that seemed to me an unbearable market restriction.

Then there was the backwards compatibility issue. Simply put, how does one migrate Dreamweaver templates to Reflow? Short answer, you can't...

I suspect Edge Reflow is now at least on hold, more probably stopped. More than 2 years and still no 1.0 on such an application that should have seen a 1.0beta after six to eight months is not a good sign anyway. After Edge Code that became Brackets in november 2014, that raises a lot of question on the Edge concept and product line. Edge Animate seems to be still maintained at Adobe (there's our old Netscape friend Kin Blas in the list of credits) but I would not be surprised if the name is changed in the future.

Too bad. I was, in the beginning, really excited by Edge Reflow. I suspect we won't hear about it again.