The Immedium Blog

On 29 June 2011, Google Labs announced Swiffy, a Google-hosted conversion utility that aims to convert Flash SWF files to HTML5/JavaScript files, allowing you to reuse Flash-developed content on devices without a Flash Player (such as the iPad). It’s a tough assignment that others have attempted without enormous success. How well does it work?

In its favour, it’s about as easy to use as could be. Nothing to install – just upload a SWF from your computer and get almost instant conversion with visual verification, plus listings of any problems or unsupported elements. Unfortunately, there are just too many unsupported features to make this a useful utility for most of the files we tried.

Firstly, Google Swiffy only supports ads developed in ActionScript 2.0, and a subset of SWF8 functionality. That rules out all ActionScript 3 developments, and indeed most recent Flash developments, since they will likely be targeting Flash Players 9, 10, or later. Google suggests that you export your Flash animation as a SWF5 file which gives some idea of how much of a SWF8 subset they are actually supporting. SWF5 is actually based on ActionScript 1.0 – that’s going back a long way!

Although Swiffy is quite good at mimicking animation, it falls down badly on script conversion and replication. Typically it shows an error of the type: “An unsupported ActionScript instruction was encountered.” There’s nowhere to go after that. But even if your ad contains no demanding ActionScript, it likely uses features like masks, shadows, stroke modulation and filters which are also problematic for Swiffy.

If you attempt to use Swiffy to convert your existing SWFs, you’re likely to be disappointed. But this is missing the point. What Google has done here is to create a free and very usable tool for Flash developers to overcome the barriers to mobile deployment of their works. Think of this as a mechanism to facilitate new development, not for reusing old assets. Yes, we have to wind the clocks back to August 2000, when Flash Player 5 was released along with the initial version of ActionScript, and we have to confine ourselves to a very limited set of features. But as the Swiffy Gallery shows, we can still do a lot with a little. Flash developers now have a tool for developing animated content along a visual timeline that they are very familiar with, and which will deliver very acceptable fallback content for devices that don’t support the Flash Player. And it can only get better.