Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5 • Hacker News Board

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#21

Post by efnx » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 5:14 PM UTC

efnx wrote: post #19

The major downside is that most webshops are and have been using Actionscript 3 for the past 5 years. Has anyone compiled any AS3 with this?

Here is the output after trying to convert one of my projects:

9-slice scaling is not supported. (11 occurrences)

Pixel hinting on strokes is not supported. (10 occurrences)

Filters are not supported. (100 occurrences)

Shape tweens are not supported. (2 occurrences)

ActionScript 3.0 is not supported. (2 occurrences)

Advanced text rendering using continuous stroke modulation is not supported. (3 occurrences)

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#22

Post by pgbovine » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 5:16 PM UTC

first paragraph of TFA:

Last summer, an engineering intern named Pieter Senster joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash animations on devices that don’t support Adobe Flash player. Pieter made such great progress that Google hired him full time and formed a team to work on the project. Swiffy was born!

what an awesomely productive intern! now that's a way to secure yourself a full-time job!

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#23

Post by kachnuv_ocasek » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 5:18 PM UTC

Great example of misuse of the HTML5 buzzword.

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#24

Post by phoboslab » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 5:19 PM UTC

fedorabbit wrote: post #20

My experience of HTML5 right now doesn't really have significant performance improvement compare to Flash, even on Mac OS X. I think it still has a long way to go. But it is nice to see someone's exploring the frontier! The blurring effect doesn't seem right though...

That really depends on what you want to do. The drawing performance for the canvas element has been dramatically improved in the last few months - for desktop browsers at least.

And then of course, there's WebGL; even if you just use it for 2D stuff (shameless plug: http://www.phoboslab.org/xtype/ ) it's way faster than Flash. I have no doubt that in a few month the the 2D canvas context will have the exact same performance (if not better) as WebGL for 2D stuff.

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#25

Post by cryptoz » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 5:20 PM UTC

fedorabbit wrote: post #20

My experience of HTML5 right now doesn't really have significant performance improvement compare to Flash, even on Mac OS X. I think it still has a long way to go. But it is nice to see someone's exploring the frontier! The blurring effect doesn't seem right though...

My experience of HTML5 is that it blows Flash out of the water. Flash on Linux is (still) an absolute disaster while HTML5 is making progress every day and has long surpassed Flash in usefulness for most tasks.

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#26

Post by tolmasky » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 5:21 PM UTC

How does this compare to Gordon? https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/wiki

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#27

Post by hammock » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 5:32 PM UTC

efnx wrote: post #21

efnx wrote: post #19

The major downside is that most webshops are and have been using Actionscript 3 for the past 5 years. Has anyone compiled any AS3 with this?

Here is the output after trying to convert one of my projects: 9-slice scaling is not supported. (11 occurrences) Pixel hinting on strokes is not supported. (10 occurrences) Filters are not supported. (100 occurrences) Shape tweens are not supported. (2 occurrences) ActionScript 3.0 is not supported. (2 occurrences) Advanced text rendering using continuous stroke modulation is not supported. (3 occurrences)

Some more errors here, just so we can start compiling a list of what is unsupported:

An unsupported SWF tag was encountered. (1 occurrences)

The global ActionScript property _quality is not supported. (1 occurrences)

Character glyphs aligned on pixel boundaries are not supported. (4 occurrences)

The #initclip pragma is not supported. (23 occurrences)

An unsupported audio codec was encountered. (1 occurrences)

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#28

Post by georgemcbay » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 5:36 PM UTC

johnhenry wrote: post #12

I can't help but wonder if content owners might view this as a threat to the security of their flash creations. Afterall, this is essentially a decompiler, isn't it?

Plain Flash SWFs are trivial to decompile and decompilers have been available basically since the beginning of the platform. Anyone who really worries about that sort of thing is running their Flash output through obfuscators/minifiers similar to the ones available for JavaScript. With such obfuscated swfs you can still extract the code but it'll be basically an unmaintainable mess. I'm sure the output of such obfuscated code with this tool is just as bad as it would be if decompiling the bytecode to ActionScript, if not worse.

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#29

Post by EvilRyry » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 5:45 PM UTC

tolmasky wrote: post #26

How does this compare to Gordon? https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/wiki

Both are ways to play flash content without flash but the approaches are quite different.

Gordon is a Flash runtime written in Javascript, allowing the browser to play SWFs.

Swiffy is a tool separate from the browser that converts SWFs into a form usable by browsers (SVG and JS).

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#30

Post by tensor » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 5:48 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #25

fedorabbit wrote: post #20

My experience of HTML5 right now doesn't really have significant performance improvement compare to Flash, even on Mac OS X. I think it still has a long way to go. But it is nice to see someone's exploring the frontier! The blurring effect doesn't seem right though...

My experience of HTML5 is that it blows Flash out of the water. Flash on Linux is (still) an absolute disaster while HTML5 is making progress every day and has long surpassed Flash in usefulness for most tasks.

I'm very skeptical. Claims like this never seem to be born out in actual benchmarks.

http://pacoup.com/2011/02/03/flash-vs-html5-performance/

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/

The advantage of flash right now is that you can be reasonably sure that if a user has it installed, they will get a minimum set of features and performance. With HTML5, your complex app may run fine, or may not run at all, depending on the users implementation.

I've no doubt the performance gap between flash and html5 will continue to narrow. However, I'm less sure that there is anything in the design of html5 that would allow for implementations that are significantly faster than flash allows for. Perhaps someone with deeper technical knowledge of the two could comment.

HTML5 does have the advantage that it's an open platform, of course. Thus you are much more likely to actually see competing implementations of the standard.