Meet Adobe's new Edge family of new and rebranded tools that might be enough to convince you of the advantages of subscribing to Adobe's Creative Cloud.

Adobe has launched a suite of HTML5/CSS/JavaScript-based developer tools which it has branded as Edge Tools & Services.

The key member of the Edge team is a tool for creating interactive, animated, Flash-style web content using a timeline editor. Already available since August 2011 as Adobe Edge Preview, it has now become Edge Animate 1.0 and, according to the Adobe Edge blog, Version 1.0 will continue to be free as an introductory offer as a thank you for the "tons of feedback"  received during the preview phase and in order to "get even more feedback and adoption".

In particular, Adobe is looking for adoption of Creative Cloud, its subscription service which provides access to all of Adobe's Creative Suite 6 as well as the new Edge Tools & Services.

All the Edge tools and services are available from the Adobe Creative Cloud although the free membership, referred to as a Starter Plan and lasting just 30 days, gives limited access to some of the Edge services and only includes 2GB of cloud storage.

Complete Membership costs $49.99 per month ($29.99 per month for students and teachers) and includes 20 GB of cloud storage. There are also standalone subscriptions for individual tools.

Edge Inspect 1.0 ($9.99 per month as a standalone subscription) is the new name for Adobe Shadow, a tool the lets designers preview websites across mobile devices.

Edge Code is currently available completely free as it has the status of a preview. It is a re-branded version of Brackets, Adobe's open source code editor for JavaScript, CSS and HTML

One member of the Edge family isn't yet ready even as a preview, although one is expected by the end of 2012. Reflow is a web design tool which lets you create responsive layouts with CSS and all that is currently available is this "sneak-peek" video:

Edge Web Fonts is also completely new and is free for the time being. It is a web font utility that lets designers take advantage the growing number of open source typefaces and is therefore very similar to Typekit, which is also now part of the Edge family and has a standalone subscription of $49.99 per year. If you access it via Creative Cloud Starter kit you are restricted to 1 site, 2 fonts and 25.000 views but once you pay the subscription there is no limit on sites and fonts and you are allowed 500,000 views.

One team member that isn't changing its name is Phone Gap Build, the cloud service which packages mobile apps built with  HTML, CSS and JavaScript into native apps that run on mobile platforms.

It's monthly subscription is $9.99 and as part of the Creative Cloud Starter kit you can only have 1 private app compared to 25 private apps.