Flash to HTML5 – Swiffy From Google

This has come just in time for mLearning implementers; there is a new tool out in Google Labs called Swiffy that let’s one convert flash animation (swf files) to a device independent HTML5. Simply put, this will allow existing libraries of flash animation content to be ported to devices that run iOS – iPhones, iPads, and iPods. This also helps us poor elearning developers circumvent the continuous war between Adobe and Apple over flash technology, and allow delivery across devices/platforms. Incidentally, Adobe had worked on just such a tool called Wallaby. We’ve been experiementing with Swiffy for a few hours now and it seems to do quite a decent job of converting SWF files. It’s also able to deal with embeddeded/nested movie clips, which is quite cool and allows for complex animations that would otherwise be a struggle to create using HTML5’s canvas element. File sizes also seem to be very small; perhaps because of the plain text nature of HTML5. If you create flash animations, you want to try it and see how your animations look ported to HTML5, and possibly running on an iOS device.