Slashdot Mirror


Smokescreen, a JavaScript-Based Flash Player

Tumbleweed writes "How to make Steve Jobs your mortal enemy: Smokescreen, a 175KB, 8,000-line JavaScript-based Flash player written by Chris Smoak at RevShock, a mobile ad startup, and to be open-sourced 'in the near future.' From Simon's blog: 'It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio, and turns them into base64 encoded data: URIs, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG. ... Smokescreen even implements its own ActionScript bytecode interpreter.' Badass!"

7 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Impressive by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unfortunately, you're exactly right. From the blog:

    (sic)"It’s stated intention is to allow Flash banner ads to execute on the iPad and iPhone, but there are plenty of other interesting applications (such as news site infographics)."

    There would be a lot of money to be made in cajoling those flash-based banner ads onto iPad / iPhone. Yep, lots o' money...

    --
    Better known as 318230.
  2. Slow on Firefox by maccodemonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is running like a dream on my Mac running Safari, but I tried it on a co-workers Mac running Firefox, and it crawled...

    Just for reference if you're trying this on Firefox.

  3. Gordon? by Jorl17 · · Score: 5, Informative

    What about Gordon? That one *is* open-source. Is it different from what TFS refers to in terms of goals (not current state)?

    --
    Have you heard about SoylentNews?
  4. Re:Impressive by Demonantis · · Score: 4, Informative

    Adblock seems to make smokescreen stop working.

  5. Re:Too slow or just me? by pushing-robot · · Score: 4, Informative

    Runs fine for me (OS X 10.6.3/Safari 4.0.5).

    CPU usage averages 15% (of one core) on the Strong Bad demo, except during the first bit with the Cheat, where it spikes to ~40%.

    Using Flash 10, CPU usage averages 8-9%, but during the same scene jumps to ~30%.

    Which is pretty damn impressive for an emulator. And proves that there's really nothing Flash can do that HTML 5 can't.

    --
    How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
  6. Re:Impressive by truthsearch · · Score: 4, Informative

    it is absolutely true that dynamic HTML 5 performance (e.g. SVG/ Canvas) is horrific on the iPhone / iPad

    It is absolutely not true. We're developing an HTML5 replacement for a flash app on a major brand's website and it's working perfectly on the iPad and iPhone. It's got moving images, videos, downloaded fonts (CSS3), etc. We haven't run into a single performance problem.

    (Can't speak for SVG, though. Never tried it).

  7. Re:Too slow or just me? by JackAxe · · Score: 4, Informative

    And proves that there's really nothing Flash can do that HTML 5 can't.

    No it doesn't. These are simple animation examples from years back . StrongBad was originally created in Flash 4. It's 2010, we're now using Flash 10.1. Flash has evolved quite a bit.

    Here's a list of what Flash can do, that HTML 5 can not; http://www.wirelust.com/2010/05/21/10-things-flash-can-do-today-that-html5-cant/