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Adobe Releases Flash To HTML 5 Converter
An anonymous reader writes "Adobe has released its Flash to HTML 5 conversion tool, codenamed 'Wallaby.' Wallaby is an application to convert Adobe Flash Professional CS5 files (.FLA) to HTML5 and its primary design goals were to get the best quality and performance on browsers within iOS devices like iPhone and iPad."
I wonder how efficient this is going to be. We don't want HTML5 to get a bunch of autogenerated bogged down code and become the next flash (performance wise, anyway).
You mean like say... Smokescreen? http://smokescreen.us/
Looks like exactly what you want, though it seems a bit slow on my cellphone.
So is this the best of both worlds for all of us? Adobe can still sell Flash authoring software, while the need for their buggy plugin fades away. End users benefit from portability and (given Adobe's track record with the plugin) security perspective. There must be a catch.
You must be new here. Adobe has come out publicly and said that HTML5 doesn't scare them because they know their plugin does not have much of a future. They want to sell authoring software, that is their entire business model. As far as Apple is concerned I don't think they really care what SJ has to say one way or another.
AccountKiller
What, exactly, about Flash do you think Adobe makes money on? It isn't the free Adobe flash player, but rather the tools to create content for the flash player. Adobe knows that HTML5 will be a mean competitor, so why wait while it gains momentum? If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. They'll still get lots of sales for their HTML5 compliant authoring tool that lets artists make cool, inaccessible, fancy things, rather than forcing companies to hire a JavaScript Guru to do the same thing.
I would bet that they would gladly give up their flash player because they don't really sell it. If you think about it the world is doing Adobe a favor by providing a file format and viewers for the content created by it's tool sets, that it actually sells. They sell their creative tools, the flash player was always needed to provide a way to view these creations. Now that HTML5 can accomplish much of this they see a way out of the constant development on their player.
Steve Jobs probably thought he was punching them in the balls, but in reality he just handed them more cash. The adobe creative suite is on almost every designer machine in the western world. "Flash", meaning SWFs might be going away, but the creative tool sets are here to stay for a long while. Then throw in their new "Flash Builder", aka Flex, and you have a powerful set of tools. That's what they sell.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
Q: How is Adobe going to react to HTML5?
A: I wouldn’t say reacting to HTML5. We see whatever people are using to express themselves. We’re going to make great tooling for HTML5. We’re going to make the best tools in the world for HTML 5.
It’s not about HTML 5 vs Flash. They’re mutually beneficial. The more important question is the freedom of choice on the web.
AccountKiller
ActionScript is practically JavaScript? Good god, that's like saying VB is practically C.
If I've got my version numbers right....
ActionScript 1 was an implementation of ECMAScript - i.e. the language was virtually identical to Javascript.
ActionScript 2 diverged from Javascript in that it included some elements that were being discussed for the next version of ECMAScript but never materialised (e.g. class-based OOP).
ActionScript 3 diverged a bit more (e.g. package-management stuff).
...AFAIK most of this was just "syntactic sugar" so, e.g. you can declare a class Java-style rather than creating a function and appending methods to its prototype JS-style. So cross-compiling ActionScript to Javascript should be mainly a job of translating shortcuts added in AS2&3 back into "longhand"
Of course, that's just the language - the Flash API is nothing like HTML DOM, but SVG seems a fairly good substitute for Flash's vector graphics. Pity that, unlike Apple, Android disabled SVG in their web browser (people forget that when they're ragging on iOS for not having Flash...) :-(
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
OTOH, Adobe makes their money from selling Flash authoring tools. I'm sure they couldn't give a crap less what the target format for their tools is, if people still buy their authoring tools. Being able to dump the expense of maintaining and distributing the Flash player, but still selling authoring tools that output HTML5 and let Flash slowly die? Sounds like a damn good business decision.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Adobe makes their money on the flash authoring tools, not the player. The more things that their tools can be used for the better.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Great suggestion! Have you ever tried it? A colleague and I were looking at Smokescreen and some other similar projects when we wanted to an old page with some Flash for a client working on the iPad.
Smokescreen looks fantastic in their demos, but they don't make it available for download anywhere and the last update to their site was nearly a year ago. This was a post "weeks" before they get the source code out. Hopefully eventually it is out eventually because it seems like a great project.
By grabbing the JS source we did try to demo it with a few pages and it croaked. It might be that our SWF files were poorly coded, we didn't create them. I suspect this might be a case similar to IE rendering bad code correctly while other browsers croak.
The other major problem is that this kind of solution needs to be implemented by the web author. I can't "install" this on my iPad and hope all Flash content magically works.
Another script we tried was called Gordon (src: https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/wiki/). Unfortunately this only works with Flash v1/v2 SWF files.
Both Gordon and Smokescreen render SWF files in the browser which is great if this is all you have. I certainly imagine this Adobe one that compiles some HTML5 code from the Flash source file works better.
They're both turing complete languages. From a technical perspective, there's nothing Javascript can do that can't also be done in Basic.
Of course, Actionscript has some nice features that JS doesn't have-- like optional strong typing and automatic closure context. It's true they're both (mostly) syntactic sugar, but they're really nice to have when you need them and they don't get in the way the rest of the time.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
However, this initial version of Wallaby offers no support for conversion of ActionScript, Movies and Sound.
This is not a Flash to HTML 5 converter. As someone else pointed out, it is for banner ads.
The focus for this initial version of Wallaby is to do the best job possible of converting typical banner ads to HTML5