Convert Flash to HTML5 | Hacker News Reader

Convert Flash to HTML5

swiffy.googlelabs.com

113 pointschrislo20 comments

"Swiffy currently supports a subset of SWF 8 and ActionScript 2.0,"

These are years out of date. It would be a lot more interesting if it could support modern versions (ActionScript 3 / FlashPlayer 9/10/10.1/10.2).

It's a start. Besides, it's cool (and so much easier) to animate stuff using Flash and then convert them to HTML5.

http://www.tumultco.com/hype/

Easy to use, creates CSS3 + HTML5-ey awesomeness.

I find it hard to think this is a "start" when two other similar tools already exist that do the same thing (forgot the names, sorry).

A "subset of Flash 8" seems to be easy but that's not even close to what Flash can currently do (Flash 8 is 6 years old already). It means the rest just seems to be impossible.

Working with "a subset of Actionscript 2.0" is pretty dang miserable if you're used the cutting edge stuff.

Can anyone report on how long this converter takes to run?

How feasible would it be for a Chrome extension where Flash elements in wegpages are seamlessly converted and displayed as HTML5 objects?

Isn't this what Gordon did? https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/wiki

You probably want Safari extension

It'd just be a pipe dream. There's so much involved. This SWF->whatever converters won't work with anything more than extremely simple animation SWFs.

If the idea is proving an HTML equivalent, it's better to just develop something in HTML5 from the ground up.

-> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705918

I don't know if that's a smart move from Google.

It would be a good thing for Google to have users frustrated with Flash websites that don't work in iOS. Now they are helping Apple giving users a great experience on iOS?

I don't think that this is about Apple. It is about web standards and pushing for a uniform web.

Good point, but pushing web standards if it hurts your business case isn't smart. Standards & nice things for developers aren't always in the best interest of companies. Apple doesn't want users to be able to create iOS Apps with Adobe's software -- because these Apps would run on every device and that would destroy their competitive advantage. Software independent of hardware was a great invention, allowing Microsoft to earn buckets of $$$ -- but that wasn't in the best interest of IBM. They had to change their focus from hardware to services to survive.

I think there was an interesting post about these kind of mechanisms on http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ but I can't find it anymore.

I believe their primary incentive is to easily convert flash ads for their advertising partners to HTML5 so they can be displayed on mobile as well.

As the above comment points out, this mainly works for Flash 5 content, so we are looking at mainly simple animations. The way I see it is that this is all about Flash-like banner ads onto iOS, which is an area that Google makes a huge amount of money from.

Anything that makes the web better is a win for Google.

This isn't a zero-sum game. Apple doesn't need to lose for Google to win.

It'll be interesting to see how well the various Flash->HTML 5 convertors will complete the job. I'm a little skeptical that it'll be much more like scaffolding than a full-on conversion but I haven't personally tried it yet. I have, however, been working with Flex for the past couple of years and I have come to the conclusion that web applications shouldn't be developed using it given the evolution of standardized HTML and Javascript.

At this point, I still think Adobe's Wallaby project has more potential.

Wallaby isn't the same thing, is it? I just looked it up (and I don't know Flash, so correct me if I'm wrong) but from Adobe's website[1], Wallaby works on FLA files and Swiffy works on SWF files, the key difference being FLA is the working, editable animation file format and SWF is intended to be a non-editable 'production' format. Thus, Wallaby is useless if I'm looking at somebody else's website with an SWF file on it (I figure going from SWF to FLA is probably analogous to decompiling binaries to source code?).

1. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/

Swiffy works well if you want to convert someone else's Flash content, while Wallaby is good for developers to convert their own content and then add any additional functionality that is missing from the conversion. As Swiffy's output isn't easy to read or edit.

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