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Flash-to-HTML5 Translator: Smart But Not Pretty
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister takes a first look at Wallaby, Adobe's experimental tool for transforming Flash content into HTML5, and finds the tool an interesting idea with little yet to offer. 'Wallaby engineers have made sound decisions in designing the tool, but what you actually get when you convert a Flash project to HTML5 is extremely limited,' McAllister writes, in large part because many Flash features are not supported, leaving developers to add their own interactivity with jQuery."
Oh boy! An article from InfoWorld.
Let me just click the print button and watch the karma pour in.
http://infoworld.com/print/154011
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
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.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
A translator from one top-heavy system to another is not pretty. Who'd have thunk it?
Ceci n'est pas une
"Hey, here's a cool new idea you'll love... too bad you can't actually use it yet."
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I wish I could mod you -1 Funny.
Insert self-referential sig here.
A dingo. Spare me the annoying ads on the iPad.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
We need to encourage people to start writing in HTML5 natively and stop trying to bandaid everything.
FTFA:
"the generated code is clean and concise -- far superior to the Save as HTML feature of Microsoft Word, for example."
Hahaha, not really saying a lot there buddy. My dog can write better HTML than M$ Word.
I've always been a bit frustrated that the community has been a bit shaky about distinguishing HTML5 as a video platform and HTML5 as a platform for building interactive applications. In the former context, HTML5 seems like a sure winner, especially given that flash for video was really a hackish (but necessary) expedient and not a great design choice. In the latter case, however, I have yet to see good examples of the sort of deep web applications in HTML5 that you can build with flash, to the extent that it makes me skeptical that HTML5 really is a replacement for flash for that purpose. Certainly no one has demoed anything nearly as sophisticated as Farmville (leaving aside the, ahem, merits of that particular insipid application) but I'm willing to imagine that's a matter of time.
IOW, I think there's a bit of confusion about where HTML5 is going to replace flash and where flash may remain (perhaps unfortunately) as the best solution.
I thought jQuery was for distributing operations over the DOM using a CSS-like element selection syntax.
Maybe they mean "interactivity with Javascript" (which is made easier to program with utilities like jQuery).
There is also an open source Flash runtime called "Gordon" that reads the SWF and executes the animation and events in a <canvas> element.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Aside from all the unsupported features, what's interesting is the number of broken things that Adobe claims, at least, to be due to browser bugs. E.g.:
"There is a known Webkit issue with complex timeline animations that crashes all Webkit browsers. This seems to increase in frequency with complex animations and on slower devices."
"Prior [to 4.2] iOS versions have known masking issues with Wallaby generated HTML files."
"Zooming in and out can cause odd artifacts in the browser. This is a bug in the browser."
"Masked artwork sometimes displays a faint border around the masked area. This is a bug in the browser."
"[in Safari] A few known animation issues with 'static' content dropping."
also some of the things that they have supported, were implemented by browser-specific means:
"The only supported Webkit browsers at this time are Chrome and Safari on OSX, Windows, and iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod). Because Wallaby uses Webkit specific animation primitives, animation will not work and has not been tested on other browsers."
So, um... what about HTML5 as the purported Flash replacement, then, if a good chunk of functionality is simply not there or is browser-specific, and even of the stuff that is supposed to work, a lot does not in current browsers, because, apparently, no-one had actually tried it with the level of complexity common for Flash apps?
McAllister apparently thinks that Wallaby is a new development (it's several months old, in fact)
Only as a demo at Adobe events. Adobe only made the preview available for download this week.
(Adobe said that it was for non-interactive content several months ago).
Really? Strange that Adobe would spend so much time documenting interactivity in Wallaby content. (Warning: PDF.)
Wallaby's not trying to port Flash content, otherwise it'd accept SWF files as input.
I presume the main reasons it accepts FLA files only are because A.) they're easier to convert, and B.) SWF is a deployment format, and Adobe is not interested in creating a tool that would allow end users to "steal" content from other people's SWF files; you need access to the original FLA project.
What McAllister should have focused on was that Adobe will create tooling that extends the relevance of their existing products as interest shifts from one technology to another.
I believe if you read the article you'll find that was my conclusion.
Breakfast served all day!
That depends. What timeline-based graphical SVG editor do you recommend? Are KToon and Synfig any good?
...that we would eventually get rid of all those annoying Flash ads.
I mean... have you really seen Flash being used for anything else but ads? Really. Especially those annoying ones that make all sorts of noises until you click them. The good uses of Flash I've seen are very very limited. As a developer there was even a time I was very keen on learning Flex myself. But in the end I'm very thankful Apple chose NOT to support it on their mobile devices.
I'd hate to see those ad-creators have a nice tool in their hands so as to bring their lil annoyances to yet one more set of screens.
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
CS5 FLA files are compressed directories whose structures are organized in an XML file. It is much easier to write an AIR app that processes assets in a CS5 FLA than it is to write any kind of app that parses a SWF's tags into JavaScript.
That's kind of what I meant when I said "they're easier to convert." Sorry I wasn't more literal. As for "preventing stealing," I stand by what I said -- Adobe has no incentive to create a tool that allows third parties to strip assets out of published SWF files.
Wallaby is an asset converter that may prolong the usefulness of Flash Professional, if it's released; it really has nothing at all to do with the Flash Player. There is a need for web-ready assets that Adobe can serve with an existing product.
I must admit I'm pretty confused by this comment. Flash SWF files are "Web-ready assets"... except on platforms where there is no Flash Player. I really don't see how you can claim my article "completely fails to address" this, when it's the entire focus.
From TFA: "More important, content, both in print and online, has long been Adobe's bailiwick -- and as the Web continues to evolve, it's not about to be caught with its pants down. A tool like Wallaby can help ensure that Adobe Flash continues to coexist with emerging standards such as HTML5, while still offering additional functionality where HTML5 falls short."
Breakfast served all day!
For the stupid sites which make their website navigation menu buttons using Flash, this should be obligatory! Surely Flash menu buttons can't be too difficult to convert.