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Interesting New Startup

convertmyflash.com

21 pointstomrik18 comments

This was posted a week ago under 'Ask HN' as a review.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2009521

It was deleted after the poster was outed for making fake accounts to comment and upvote. It shouldn't detract from the startup and its reviews, but I guess at least an apology is in order for trying to game the community.

umm..those were REAL accounts by real people..who truly liked the service. All i wanted to do was to spark a conversation..which is Finally happening. Im not running for president. i dont need votes. just your feedback which im very grateful for.. thank u HN

The domain name is pretty clever assuming your customers are already drinking the "flash-is-dead" koolaid, but this is a service that any web developer can offer. Incidentally, the tracypaul demo isn't HTML5, and doesn't even animate like in the original site.

And don't even get me started on the comment at the top triggering quirksmode.

This deserves more mention. My initial reaction was something along the lines of "oh, ho-hum, they've figured out how to convert Flash animation into equivalent canvas effects without running an entire flash VM in javascript", but that demo makes it look more like they barely do anything more than extract image resources and cobble together a CSS template that makes the page look basically the same. If somebody had a website that used Flash for anything complex they would be sorely disappointed by these results. I guess their main market is websites that had no business using Flash in the first place?

Good point. I haven't really dug in to see if they're doing it well or not.

If they're just doing what you say, then they're going to have a lot of upset clients very quickly.

To meet client's expectations, we do a full phone consultation explaining the scope of the service. ( and soon in an FAQ )

For most customers, we are discovering that the basic plan/feature set is enough to get them started ( remember ITS NOT REPLACING their Flash site.. just AUGMENTING IT )

However, the few who cant live without their custom apps and animations, we do offer the ability to customize their site down to the pixel.

thank for your feedback,

artur | founder

I don't think you need to drink any "koolaid."

There are many reasons to convert from Flash to HTML, not least of which is cross-device compatibility. Philosophy and ideological arguments might be interesting over coffee at 3am, but right now, companies want HTML5 sites.

Sure, any web developer can offer this service. The point is that they ARE doing it, and packaging their service very well.

I've already sent this site to friends at three different agencies, and got enthusiastic responses all around.

For the record, I'm not trying to start a silly argument about philosophies or whatever, I'm just making an observation that many people who are not techies don't really care if you're using a guy in tights or a movie about coffee.

FWIW, my company already offers these same services, (in addition to many other). These days, you'd be foolish not to, since it requires such a trivial skillset (as far as webdevs go anyways).

I did mention that I liked the domain name. I just wasn't all that impressed with the quality of the demo (both in terms of pizzazz and code quality).

I have to agree now that I've looked more at what they're really doing.

It's a good concept/name, like you say, but doesn't look like they're actually executing on it.

"companies want HTML5 sites"? No, they want buzzwords. This isn't HTML5 in any meaningful way, sure if they carried across the "effects" and stuff it might be truly "converting" flash, but all they're doing is remaking the layout removing everything that the client probably originally wanted (unless they were pushed into using Flash by a crappy developer) and then packaging it as some magical "social" win.

To me, the idea of 'converting my flash' isn't just about content. I think they need to set the bar low for customers.

I was expecting that somehow they were maintaining the animation and interaction of flash.

Of course it is very impressive that in the demo they are able to take a flash heavy site and make the content viewable in a similar design but in straight html. They have lost the music, the animations, and some of the design intricacies.

For most of these reasons, I think that a good developer/designer would push the customer to move the site to html5 and pay a few thousand dollars and only maintain one code base. It seems to me that at some point, something here would become a legacy system. If the world is going to HTML5, should I be writing in Flash and converting (and to a less engaging experience)?

What the heck is an "iTouch"?

Using correct brand names conveys trustworthiness.

ipod touch. I've seen/heard it referred to as iTouch numerous times.

pak definitely knew what an iTouch was, and I similarly cringe when I hear people refer to it like so.

It's not really 'convert my flash' is it, it's 'adapt my homepage to work with non-flash compatible devices'

It's a compromise more than a direct translation!

Nice idea though, I like the succinctness of their message, it gets the idea out to people what they do instead of just offering it as one of their services

it is..actually.

we can create an exact replica of the flash site both in design and functionality. ( but this would be a custom project with a greater price tag )

but we realized giving them 95% their flash site is good enough for them to start out. Then as they grow, they can easily build on the framework themselves or have us do it.

I find their service pretty low quality. Especially for 900$.

Their example is this website: http://www.tracypaul.com/ That they converted to this: http://tracypaul.convertmyflash.com/

The pages are not the same, much less nicer. No music anymore (even tho I don't like music, html5 has music and I think it is important for the site to be identical). Also if you change pages on the html5 site, there is no animation! It just changes pages in the browser, which is ugly and completely useless! AJAX!!!

Without digging on the details of the service, the concept is great.

Incredibly easy to sell to a client, and a strong promise. If they can just deliver, they'll be doing great for the immediate future.

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