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With this ;)

Flash is a dead man walking.

And it'll keep walking as long as Strong Bad Emails are still made in Flash. Or are you putting your faith in Smokescreen to emulate existing SWF animations on top of HTML5?

Because that's all I want or care to know. Homestar is pretty much the only thing I need Flash for anymore. And yes I know that Smokescreen exists but this sounds much better.

IIRC Smokescreen supports ActionScript.

You mean like say... Smokescreen? http://smokescreen.us/
Looks like exactly what you want, though it seems a bit slow on my cellphone.

You can interpret flash into HTML5, the smokescreen project has done this and has working demos on their site:

http://smokescreen.us/demo/

If you're clever you can get the code and play around with it.

However the project seems to be dead. There have been no new releases, the code hasn't been GPL'd as promised, and there have been no news updates on the site. I've tried to contact people involved in the project and have received no response.

If the project's dead I wish they'd just GPL the code so that it can be forked and development can continue.

How does this compare to other SWF players written in JavaScript, such as Gordon or Smokescreen? Ideally, these SWF players should run entirely inside Safari.

There are several implementations of Flash that run in iOS Safari without the need for jailbreaking or violating any agreements with Apple. There is absolutely nothing stopping Adobe from bringing Flash to Safari on iOS, though this announcement gives them even less reason to do so.

Actually, the iPhone can already play Strong Bad. There is nothing really stopping someone from bringing Flash to the iPhone, SDK agreements included. However, since Adobe is not committed, it is going to take someone else to put forth the effort to make it happen.

That depends. Does Homestar Runner play in HTML5?

Yes, yes it does.

This means very little. Anyone can make a subset of a language faster then a full implementation.

The Ruby world has been through this recently: Someone comes out with a fantastic runtime that supports 1/8 of the ruby language, and it's 10x faster then everything else!

There's lots of hype, but as development continues the other runtimes get 2x faster, and the new magic runtime gets 5x slower by actually supporting the whole language, and the new magic runtime is now the same speed as the rest of the field, with less compatibility and more memory usage.

So color me skeptical, until this runtime supports the whole language, including transparent overlays and all the stuff that the Adobe guys claim makes Flash slow.

Even the author of this article will tell you this. He recently added:

Update: Please do not think that this implementation is 30x faster than the Flash Player developed by Adobe. One(!) microbenchmark is never a number you should count on. I would like to make clear that I never said this.

That being said, If we're stuck with Flash for at least the near term, I'd like to see projects like this, Gordon, and Smokescreen take off and perhaps improve our choices in runtimes. I just don't expect magic.

You need a minimum of a Cortex A8-family processor to run Flash and many lower-end and older Android phones just don't pack the horsepower to pull it off.

Really?

If you need that much power then how are the Cortex A8-family processor-based machines ever going to handle everything through jscript+html5 canvas?

I saw a comment elsewhere that pointed to some HTML5 demos at http://smokescreen.us/demo/

I decided to hit the very first one on my Pentium Mobile 1.6GHz, strongbad's e-mail #45:
http://smokescreen.us/demos/sb45demo.html
Result: 100% CPU use, sound/video synchronization issues, stuttering, etc.

Then I checked out the standard Flash version:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: 16% CPU use, perfectly smooth.

Then I read your comment and remembered that Adobe in fact have a Flash player available for my old Windows Mobile 5 phone (a QTek 9100 / HTC Wizard. TI OMAP 850, 200MHz). You can download it from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_pocketpc/downloads/player.html
So I checked that same SB email out on that device:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: Perfectly smooth, running full-screen within Pocket IE. Can't give you a CPU use number as I don't have any CPU use app installed on it, but I had no problem playing back some MP3s in the background.

Surprised? You shouldn't be. I highly suspect you're thinking of h.264 video being played back - and indeed, checking out a YouTube video is a different experience altogether - i.e. slow with lots of video frames skipped; although I can watch (barely, as the screen is so small) my favorite StarGate SG-1 episode on it just fine (re-encoded for the format, of course).

But Flash is more than just video... so saying you need a beefy processor for Flash-in-general is inaccurate at best.

You need a minimum of a Cortex A8-family processor to run Flash and many lower-end and older Android phones just don't pack the horsepower to pull it off.

Really?

If you need that much power then how are the Cortex A8-family processor-based machines ever going to handle everything through jscript+html5 canvas?

I saw a comment elsewhere that pointed to some HTML5 demos at http://smokescreen.us/demo/

I decided to hit the very first one on my Pentium Mobile 1.6GHz, strongbad's e-mail #45:
http://smokescreen.us/demos/sb45demo.html
Result: 100% CPU use, sound/video synchronization issues, stuttering, etc.

Then I checked out the standard Flash version:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: 16% CPU use, perfectly smooth.

Then I read your comment and remembered that Adobe in fact have a Flash player available for my old Windows Mobile 5 phone (a QTek 9100 / HTC Wizard. TI OMAP 850, 200MHz). You can download it from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_pocketpc/downloads/player.html
So I checked that same SB email out on that device:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: Perfectly smooth, running full-screen within Pocket IE. Can't give you a CPU use number as I don't have any CPU use app installed on it, but I had no problem playing back some MP3s in the background.

Surprised? You shouldn't be. I highly suspect you're thinking of h.264 video being played back - and indeed, checking out a YouTube video is a different experience altogether - i.e. slow with lots of video frames skipped; although I can watch (barely, as the screen is so small) my favorite StarGate SG-1 episode on it just fine (re-encoded for the format, of course).

But Flash is more than just video... so saying you need a beefy processor for Flash-in-general is inaccurate at best.

You do realize that your link is just emulating a flash player in Javascript don't you? It's like Adobe's player, but worse. I suppose it illustrates my point though. There simply are no tools out there that can replace the Flash tools we need, and Apple is stupid to suggest we all abandon it. It seems the Smokescreen developers agree with me

Apple's suggested alternative to Flash? Javascript and SVG!

http://smokescreen.us/

Apple says Flash is welcome... as long as it is implemented in HTML5. And so that is what people did. Everyone except for Adobe themselves.

Really goes to show that Adobe does not stand behind their platform. They are only in it to milk their existing codebase.

...For everything else, there's SmokeScreen.

Heard of Smokescreen? The goal (and their work so far shows it's not unattainable) is a JS/HTML5 Flash player. Flash without the plugin.

If they can do that to the quality of the plugin, then there's no damned reason that people can't write native JS/HTML5 code to do the same thing. And there's no reason it should be any more difficult once the JS libraries and IDEs catch up with the specs.

Whether you like it or not, Flash is here to stay:
http://smokescreen.us/

For iPhone/iPad users, it just runs a lot slower now. :)

The point is the development tools are awesome for Flash and support the Designer -> Developer synergy necessary to get good looking apps/sites out there.

All the reasons given in the article are valid, but to understand why those reasons are valid, you need to have been involved in the design process, and more importantly, tried taken a design through the development process and tried to argue why SIFR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacement ) is a bad thing, but still have to implement it.

http://smokescreen.us/demos/sb45demo.html

Just open it in Chrome. I can't tell the difference between the flash and the javascript version.

(Also oddly enough the source code is right here? http://smokescreen.us/demos/js/smokescreen.0.1.3-min.js or did he mean he'll clean it up...)

http://smokescreen.us/demos/sb45demo.html

Just open it in Chrome. I can't tell the difference between the flash and the javascript version.

(Also oddly enough the source code is right here? http://smokescreen.us/demos/js/smokescreen.0.1.3-min.js or did he mean he'll clean it up...)