Swiffy, Google’s Flash-to-HTML5 converter, gets more features and a new home
An example Chrome advert before and after the conversion. Go here for live demo.
Swiffy, Google’s experimental tool that converts Flash files to HTML5 code, will not be killed off due to their Fall spring-cleaning which will retire other Google Labs projects, namely Fast Flip, Desktop and Notebook, among others. Engineer Pieter Senster wrote in a post over at the official Google Code blog that Swiffy has a new home at g.co/swiffy. Although it’s in beta and won’t convert overly complex Flash files, Swiffy has gotten off to a great start and already users have converted “hundreds of thousands of files”, the company noted.
Google also highlighted several new features, such as support for shape tweening and drop shadow, blur and glow filters, all using SVG, CSS and JavaScript. A great example of Swiffy is this Chrome banner, which converted into HTML5 runs and looks just as smooth and pixel-perfect as its Flash counterpart. Google specifically mentions iOS devices in the Swiffy description which details how the web-based tool lets people“reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (such as iPhones and iPads)”.
