Smokescreen project is an effort to bring Flash player to the iPhone/iPad without installing the Flash plug-in. It’s an open source project implemented in HTML5 and JavaScript. For now this project is targeted at advertisers to enable them to run Flash ads on the iPhone/iPad.
Primarily, it reads the binary SWF file and renders its animation and audio content to standard web compliant format. The Smokescreen project demos are available at this the smokescreen’s website, these demos will work on the HTML5 compatible browsers Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5, Safari 4 and Opera 10.53.
Here’s is what Simon Willison has to say about Smokescreen:
Chris Smoak’s Smokescreen, “a Flash player written in JavaScript”, is an incredible piece of work. It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.
This is just a beginning and there are several benefits for mLearning developers as with Smokescreen they will be able develop content using existing Flash skills and run it across all the mobile device browsers. Although the project is still in the initial stages and for now is targeted only at advertisers. I feel it has potential to improve over time and allow complex animations and interactions developed in Flash to work on Flash disabled mobile platforms. Apple’s blocking Flash has actually pushed the developers to innovate and essentially develop the Flash player in HTML5 and JavaScript. I wouldn’t be surprised to see future releases of Adobe’s Flash Professional publishing HTML5 compatible output.
