Adobe Project ROME

Alongside all the announcements at its MAX developer conference Monday in Los Angeles, Adobe has just made public a free beta content creation platform called ROME.

For years, outfits like and WetPaint have offered online site building, but ROME promises to get the average user building truly interactive multimedia web applications. Though Adobe has offered expensive tools for professionals to do this, ROME is intended to be simple enough for nontechnical users to use for home, school or work projects.

Adobe's John Loiacono, senior vice president and GM of Digital Media Solutions, writes in a blog post, "Our goal is to make Project ROME so intuitive and fluid, that the technology doesn't get in your way of expressing ideas with video, audio, photos, graphics, text and animation. The interface is clean and simple, yet powerful. Underneath is Adobe's industry-standard technology at work but engineered in a way so that you can quickly and easily begin to use it. Project ROME is for those of us who aren't professional designers, but want to express our ideas in a more powerful way using digital content."

Adobe has also created a version specifically aimed at educators, called, logically, Project ROME for Education. The version adds secure collaboration similar to that in Google Docs. The education version is available at

I spent a little time with ROME, and as you'd expect from Adobe, its interface is smooth and clear, and completely Flash-based. It starts by showing the launch bar, from which you create or open a project. You can start a new project based on a selection of also-well-designed templates, including animations, brochures, flyers, and websites. The Education section adds certificates, digital stories, quizzes, and reports. There's also a Template Exchange, where users can upload their creations. This section requires signing in with an Adobe account, and actually offered more compelling examples than the stock templates—solar system, e-portfolio, and an events tutorial. The Exchange lets you view user ratings, most downloaded, latest, and staff picks.

Once you choose a template, you can preview it, share it on your favorite social network, or send a link to it in email. When you open a template, a workspace is revealed, offering tools for drawing, color, text, and warping, too. Along the bottom is an animation timeline, letting you set timings for animations. You can insert objects like new sheets, shapes, media (like images, maps, but not videos), interactive components (like buttons and hotspots). There's even an object exchange, where I found a chess object and a post-it object. Objects can be grouped.

When you've made some progress, you can preview your creation within the building environment. The desktop apps, available for Windows and Macintosh, require the Adobe AIR runtime, as you'd expect. Installing requires two agreement check boxes—one allowing Adobe to collect usage data. Like most Air apps, the desktop version looks identical to the web one, the only difference being that you can run it while not connected to the internet.

Output options include Flash .SWF, Interactive .PDF, and publishing to the ROME site or template exchange. Notably missing, though, is the ability to output standard HTML or JavaScript for your site.

At first blush, the builder takes a little more design chops than Adobe seems to suggest, but fortunately there are tutorials and YouTube videos to take you through common processes. Unfortunately, the Help inside the product hasn't yet been fleshed out. To try ROME out for yourself, head to

Project ROME is currently available only in English, in the United States.