Google Launches 'Swiffy' Flash-to-HTML5 Converter

[zapnyc]

the results in their Gallery definitely don't work in Firefox 3.6.16....Safari no problem.... interesting

 

[e32boy]

So I converted a 40K swf with this tool.
Ended up being a 400K file and didn't end up looking exactly like the swf file and plays soooooooo slowwwwwww on my iOS devices.

I don't get this anti flash thing.

The more available options the better for all users.
HTML5 and CSS3 can play nice with swf & flv.

SJ's swf ban has more to do with economics of the app store than a better user experience.

at lease now you can block swf ads.
HTML5? nope.

 

[macUser2007]

I think you'll find that every modern web browser can handle HTML5 perfectly fine 😉

...

Perfectly fine?!

Take a look at http://html5test.com/results.html

Not even close....

To boot, Apple's Safari's HTML5 support is behind both Firefox and Google.

To boot even more, iOS 4.3's HTML5 support is behind both Android's and WebOS's.

Anyway, I like HTML5, but I also like Flash. They are both useful. Flash can do way more complex animations, however.

The ban on Flash is because Jobs tried to become the mobile Google with iAd. But iAd is failing miserably, so in a year or so I'd imagine iOS will have Flash. Flash sites run perfectly fine on my Google Nexus S, by the way.

 

[macUser2007]

the results in their Gallery definitely don't work in Firefox 3.6.16....Safari no problem.... interesting

They probably will not work in Safari 1.0, either....

You do know that Firefox is currently at version 5, right? (They do work in v5, BTW)

You can always use the Flash version, though. In any browser. 😀

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Right.... 🙄

Except that in our universe the majority of users will not be able to see your HTMP5 creations in their browsers, while virtually everyone can see the Flash versions.

Plus, for complex animation Flash is way ahead of HTML5....

I don't disagree.

I'm just saying that if your goal is an HTML5 page, don't create it in Flash then use an automated converter to turn it into HTML5. Start with HTML5.

It's like when you see a Mac OS X application that obviously started life as a Windows app, and was badly ported. Just spend the effort to make a native OS X app, your users will be much happier.

 

[roadbloc]

From a user perspective, I find Flash > HTML5. Maybe that is probably because most browsers don't support HTML5 fully yet and when thy do, it will kick Flash's butt, but to this day I have yet to have a problem with Flash and I simply do not understand Apple's problem with it.

 

[Nostromo]

Currently, many professional photographer portfolios are in Flash.

But their iPhone/iPad sites are HTML mirror sites.

So, quality Flash content IS alread available to the iPhone/iPad. Not only for iPhone/iPad reasons, but also and very much for SEO reasons (Flash sites fare poorly in SEO).

So maybe that Flash content you can't see on the iPad/iPhone is content where the site owners decided against an HTML mirror site. One may wonder if this is quality content and if google's software is really as interesting content-wise as its technical workings (which are astounding if it really works well).

 

[AdrianK]

So I converted a 40K swf with this tool.
Ended up being a 400K file and didn't end up looking exactly like the swf file and plays soooooooo slowwwwwww on my iOS devices.

I don't get this anti flash thing.

Hold on, you're saying you don't get why people dislike Flash, based on your experience of Swiffy? Don't you see how that's incredibly biased?

On one side you have code which has been composed in order to make the best use of features present in one language, which you're comparing to code generated by a machine which is just using a set of rules to translate to another language.

Obvious a converter will not spit out code which is as optimised as it could be. It's like expecting Google Translate to spit out something which is 100% accurate.

 

[holmesf]

Quite.

If you look at the demos provided, you'll see that the Flash versions use less CPU % than the HTML5 generated alternatives.

I don't think any browser currently uses hardware acceleration to render SVG.

In general (triangles aside) vector graphics are not GPU accelerated on any platform. This includes svg, flash*, pdf, Quartz**, etc. Canvas rendering is typically an order of magnitude faster than the SVG rendering Google is doing.

*only video and compositing are accelerated on flash, not drawing paths and shapes. On the mobile version of flash vector shapes are crudely converted to triangles first.

**When we talk about Quartz Extreme it's still only bitmap drawing, which includes text glyphs and images being accelerated, not drawing paths and shapes.

 

[holmesf]

From a user perspective, I find Flash > HTML5. Maybe that is probably because most browsers don't support HTML5 fully yet and when thy do, it will kick Flash's butt, but to this day I have yet to have a problem with Flash and I simply do not understand Apple's problem with it.

The problem is that Flash is responsible for the majority of Safari crashes, and performance optimizing Flash is out of Apple's control.

Besides that there are the usual problems with Flash (doesn't integrate well with web pages, slow, poor Linux support, etc, etc, etc).