Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

googlecode.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 77 posts

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#51

Post by joshuarrrr »

hammock wrote: post #27
efnx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

A couple more:

Miter limit will behave differently, as it will revert to bevel instead of cutting off the joint. (65 occurrences)

Adjusting the font kerning within dynamic text is not supported. (7 occurrences)

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#52

Post by noduerme »

spjwebster wrote: post #44
smackfu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That probably should say: "joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash advertisements on devices that don’t support Adobe Flash player" Which is not really the cool HTML5 future anyone is looking for.

Anyone who is looking for the "cool HTML5 future" to be ad-free is going to be bitterly disappointed. Online ads predated the ubiquity of Flash, and they'll be around long after Flash is forgotten.

yeahhh... basically we can turn the last 15 years of annoying flash ads back into the modern equivalent of animated gifs. whoopee =)

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#53

Post by CodeMage »

noduerme wrote: post #47
jarek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm beginning to doubt we'll ever actually get to a fully cross-browser web. We've had two broad reboot attempts (first to "XHTML+CSS", the current one to "HTML5") and both times we ended up largely with a limited list of browsers and engines supported just as we had in the days of Netscape 4.x/IE4. The supported browsers are the cool browsers/engines of the day, which we then proceed to curse in three-…

The cross browser web already exists. It's called AS3. The only reason it gets a lot of bad press is that no one wants to snuggle up to Adobe. Meanwhile everybody flails around pretending that HTML5+JS will solve the problem, when that was already a dinosaur five years ago, and as you said will never be supported uniformly across browsers. Edit: Here come the fanbois to downrate me. Consider your own karma. Downratin…

Unfortunately, you are at least partially right. HTML5+JS might be an acceptable solution to lots of problems, but I don't see web game development moving away from stuff like Flash and Unity to a W3C standard. It probably has a lot to do with having to wait forever while the W3C labors to push any damn thing out.

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#54

Post by tptacek »

noduerme wrote: post #47
jarek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm beginning to doubt we'll ever actually get to a fully cross-browser web. We've had two broad reboot attempts (first to "XHTML+CSS", the current one to "HTML5") and both times we ended up largely with a limited list of browsers and engines supported just as we had in the days of Netscape 4.x/IE4. The supported browsers are the cool browsers/engines of the day, which we then proceed to curse in three-…

The cross browser web already exists. It's called AS3. The only reason it gets a lot of bad press is that no one wants to snuggle up to Adobe. Meanwhile everybody flails around pretending that HTML5+JS will solve the problem, when that was already a dinosaur five years ago, and as you said will never be supported uniformly across browsers. Edit: Here come the fanbois to downrate me. Consider your own karma. Downratin…

I think you're getting downvoted for implying that something can be "cross-browser" that is locked into a single vendor. Your point is clear, but it exploits a nerdy little loophole in the definition of "cross-brwoser".

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#55

Post by evilduck »

tptacek wrote: post #54
noduerme wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cross browser web already exists. It's called AS3. The only reason it gets a lot of bad press is that no one wants to snuggle up to Adobe. Meanwhile everybody flails around pretending that HTML5+JS will solve the problem, when that was already a dinosaur five years ago, and as you said will never be supported uniformly across browsers. Edit: Here come the fanbois to downrate me. Consider your own karma. Downratin…

I think you're getting downvoted for implying that something can be "cross-browser" that is locked into a single vendor. Your point is clear, but it exploits a nerdy little loophole in the definition of "cross-brwoser".

Not only that, but Flash isn't perfectly "cross-platform" either. It's really only a great experience on Windows and 32 bit and a crapshoot everywhere else, it's still the major cause of browser crashes everywhere else, has struggled with 64 bit implementations, has a long history of sandbox security problems, and their feigned "open source" efforts where there's proprietary parts they don't document or release garners them few OSS friends, downgrades poorly, is a significant resource requirement overhead, and isn't very accessible by default (the standard swf you encounter will not be blind-user accessible).

If Flash is the answer, we're in even worse shape than using HTML/JS.

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#56

Post by gaustin »

sheffield wrote: post #45
pgbovine wrote: post #22

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-tim…

FTA == From The Article. ;)

You're right about the definition of FTA in this context. But TFA means The F(ucking|ine|*) Article in this context.

I bet it's not a typo.

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#57

Post by getsat »

sheffield wrote: post #45
pgbovine wrote: post #22

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-tim…

FTA == From The Article. ;)

TFA is a Slashdotism.

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#58

Post by pornel »

noduerme wrote: post #47
jarek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm beginning to doubt we'll ever actually get to a fully cross-browser web. We've had two broad reboot attempts (first to "XHTML+CSS", the current one to "HTML5") and both times we ended up largely with a limited list of browsers and engines supported just as we had in the days of Netscape 4.x/IE4. The supported browsers are the cool browsers/engines of the day, which we then proceed to curse in three-…

The cross browser web already exists. It's called AS3. The only reason it gets a lot of bad press is that no one wants to snuggle up to Adobe. Meanwhile everybody flails around pretending that HTML5+JS will solve the problem, when that was already a dinosaur five years ago, and as you said will never be supported uniformly across browsers. Edit: Here come the fanbois to downrate me. Consider your own karma. Downratin…

> The cross browser web already exists. It's called AS3.

AS3 is not cross-AS3-player.

Does it have two (or more) interoperable implementations? Can it run on platforms not supported by Adobe?

While single-vendor closed-source plugin is strictly speaking cross-browser, it doesn't have things we want from "cross-browser" solutions:

• freedom to run it on any computing platform (people run HTML+JS on their Amigas, because they can!), now and in the future (what if Adobe decides that maintenance of Flash Player is unprofitable? How useful would be archive.org in 20 years when none of supported platforms is alive?)

• competition between implementations, so that if one stars sucking or does something user-hostile, competitors will take over (You don't have browsers with hidden hard-to-delete cross-site cookies — they compete on privacy features!)

> You cannot build a 3d racing game in HTML5+JS in the browser.

There's a quite convincing proof of concept that you can: http://helloracer.com/webgl/

It doesn't work on iPhone and I'm not sure if it works 64-bit Linux, but that's not a problem, right? :)

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#59

Post by leviathant »

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.

Every time I see a post about how HTML5+JS+CSS3 is so much better than Flash, they clearly are ignoring major subsets of what Flash does. First and foremost, browser-native audio processing is nearly a decade behind Flash. Not just in theory - toward the end of last year through February of this year, I set about emulating a fairly simple drum machine in HTML + Javascript, and while the fundamentals are basically there, the audio playback is atrocious on every single browser - try it out at http://bitrotten.com/dr110/

It was a fun experience, and maybe later this year I'll grab a trial of Flash and port it there, just to A/B them. But if you think HTML5 is going to replace Flash, you have a limited knowledge of what Flash can do.

Re: Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

#60

Post by lparry »

noduerme wrote: post #46

Sweet! So all the obnoxious animation and banner ads can be converted into "HTML5" that runs 3x slower and sucks up 80% of a dual core processor per ad...and NONE of the actual coding, deep interactivity or UI enhancements implied in the ECMA4/AS3 platform are included. Is this the shape of things to come? Let me off this stupid ride, google. I vote DuckDuckGo, pageranks based on qualified user responses regardless o…

You're obviously a windows user (and a flash "developer"), because for people on every other platform it's flash that chews up 80%CPU time and runs dog slow. Maybe if adobe hadnt give every other platform such shitty implementations, there mightn't be so many people working towards killing it.
Post reply on HN