Whew! I just finished watching the recording from yesterday's Create the Web event in San Francisco and frankly, my head is spinning. You can watch it below.

Adobe is using these events to introduce the release of a mountain of software and services that focuses on the development of mobile-ready content and apps. Not that long ago, Flash would have played a central role in this but there was Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch waxing poetic about the joys of using HTML, CSS and JavaScript to extend the capabilities of web development with nary a mention of the F word. It's rather startling to watch such a mature technology get so thoroughly thrown under the bus but hats off to Adobe for biting the bullet and embracing web standards so fully. I recommend the event video for a heads up and then the Adobe site for details. In what follows I'll simply provide an overview with a Creative Cloud perspective.

Effectively, this entire initiative has two functions: first, to send a strong signal that the era of Flash is officially over and that Adobe intends to continue to dominate the web and mobile development world via the release of new tools, many with an open source element. And second, to place this squarely within the framework of Creative Cloud. It's clear that those not subscribing will increasingly be marginalized, since these tools and services are geared to members.

In a recent earnings call, Shantanu Narayen, Adobe Chief Executive Officer, President and Director, indicated that there are now about 200,000 paid CC members (and surprisingly, 300,000 free ones) and later in the call it was indicated that about 8,000 new subscriptions were being added each week. While this is well about the 5,000 that Adobe had estimated, the financial community is still breathing down the firm's neck. So making CC virtually irresistible is obviously job one at the moment and with the addition of the Digital Publishing Suite last week and now the CC-only Edge Tools and Services, I'd say Adobe isu making a convincing case. Let's take a look at what has just been added.

Edge Animate
This first saw the light of day two years ago as "an experiment in standard-based animation" and has now hit version 1. Described by Adobe as a motion and interaction design tool that allows users to bring animated content to the Web using HTML, JavaScript and CSS, it has little competition and with this release emerges as the leader in a category of tools that will only grow, as developers seek to take advantage of web standards to bring life to their projects.

Edge Inspect
Formerly known as Shadow, this inspection and preview tool allows front-end Web developers and designers to preview and debug HTML content on multiple mobile devices. Pretty sweet to see the content update in real time on a specified device when the code is changed. Pressing a single button to generate screen shots of all the connected devices is also a snazzy feature.

Edge Reflow
This responsive Web design tool is designed to help users create layouts and visual designs with CSS. Being able to interactively tweak layouts for different devices is a great idea. Unfortunately, a preview release won't be available until near the end of this year. The clip below provides a sense of what it will do.

Typekit
Decades ago, Adobe was a champion of the use of professional-quality digital fonts. That initiative had been put on the back burner in recent years so it was good to see that with its purchase of the Typekit web fonts service it was back in the game. This has been a significant part of a CC subscription since the beginning but it now has been given a big boost by the addition of more than 1,000 fonts from Monotype.

Edge Code
This one really got my attention, since I do a fair amount of coding in Dreamweaver. Currently available as a preview, it's built on the Brackets open source project, which apparently means it's easily customizable. Sounds great but while that's too deep for me, its ability to perform real time edits of the underlying CSS and JavaScript powering a page would make things easier, since with my modest coding skills, tweaking is my life.

PhoneGap Build
This is something I'll probably never use but it does sound intriguing. The idea is that you can simply take your HTML, CSS and JavaScript assets and PhoneGap will handle the pesky compilation side of things for creating mobile apps.

Dreamweaver Update
It would seem CC subscribers can now update Dreamweaver to add support for Edge Animate, as well as new HTML5 tags and unspecified "other new features." I haven't found any more details on this yet but it's another example of how the capabilities of the CC versions of Creative Suite applications will be continually updated, leaving those with traditional licenses increasingly behind.

Well, what does it all mean? The last few weeks have clearly shown that Adobe sees its future, and that of its customers, as being based on the Creative Cloud. Love it or hate it, Adobe's subscription model is increasingly taking on an aura of inevitability. The train would seem to be leaving the station, so it might be wise to at least give the free trial a shot. If you like what you see, then you have until the end of this year to take advantage of the $29.99 per month rate for the first twelve months. After that... well, who can predict the future?