Company Needs to Switch to New Software

[Ronald]

The company I work for creates a software of healthcare touch-screen modules that educate patients with text, narration, graphics, and animations on a given medical topic. We still use Flash MX (I know, ancient) but are trying to provide to a market that's gradually favoring tablets/mobile devices, by providing an HTML5 version of the software. For this, the static pages are saved as PNGs and the animations as GIFs, resulting in ugly patterns and off colors for those slides.

My boss admits that Flash is dying but isn't being proactive about the future. With my limited knowledge of software, I'm thinking Adobe Edge seems to be the logical next step if/when we abandon Flash. I don't want to scrap the thousands of graphics and great new animations I've developed in Flash, so I do think they need to be carried over however possible.

One of my concerns is, will all graphics need to be created in Illustrator and then imported into Edge? And maybe there's another vector animation software I should look into before jumping to Edge.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[Steve Rindsberg]

One thing that occurred to me right away is to ask whether a program like Camtasia or the like couldn't convert your existing Flash animations to a movie format that'd be compatible with HTML5. They'd no longer be editable, but you could always revert to the flash version for edits if needed.

That wouldn't be any help moving forward with new stuff, but it'd at least let you move your existing work forward.