Steve Jobs’ open letter on Flash last year was perhaps one of the most crucial technology decisions ever made. Jobs mentioned several good reasons why he believes that Adobe Flash is not a good fit iOS devices and the rest as they say, is history. Though Flash was officially banned, several hacks including Skyfire, Frash, [...]
Steve Jobs’ open letter on Flash last year was perhaps one of the most crucial technology decisions ever made. Jobs mentioned several good reasons why he believes that Adobe Flash is not a good fit iOS devices and the rest as they say, is history. Though Flash was officially banned, several hacks including Skyfire, Frash, Smokescreen and several others allowed iPhone and iPad users to run flash content on their devices. And now, Adobe has joined the Flash alterative brigade with Wallaby – a tool that converts Flash into HTML5 enabling it to run on devices that do not support the Flash runtimes. Read on to know more about Flash Wallaby.
Though Wallaby is an experimental offering by Adobe Labs, it’s an interesting landmark in the Flash vs. HTML5 debate. Adobe has always maintained that HTML5 isn’t a substitute for Flash and the company has proved its point by offering a Flash-to-HTML5 converter. Wallaby was revealed at the Adobe’s Max 2010 developer conference last year and since it’s a free drag and drop tool, the developer community has been eagerly awaiting its launch.
Wallaby is essentially a cross-platform Adobe AIR application that converts Flash content (FLA files) to HTML5. Wallaby claims to support several Flash features including vector art and images; classic text; keyframes; MovieClips and graphics; classic, motion, and shape tweens; rollover buttons; and instance names. It supports batch processing and provides advanced diagnostic reporting capabilities.
While the list sounds exciting, Wallaby has several limitations including the inability to convert audio, video, and ActionScript. Moreover, the conversion result isn’t something which can directly run on any mobile platforms e.g. Wallaby converts bitmaps to image elements and JPEG files which require being fine-tuned before they can be used. Further, Wallaby does not provide conversion for filters, TLF and dynamic masks.
Despite these limitations, Wallaby is yet another proof that Flash will continue to live in the world of iPhones and iPads. Whether Adobe can transform it from an experimental product to a robust developer tool remains to be seen.
Lily Allen
Nadine Velazquez
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