Some Google projects
really do start from one person hacking around. Last summer, an engineering intern named
Pieter Senster joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash
animations on devices that don’t support Adobe Flash player. Pieter made such great progress
that Google hired him full time and formed a team to work on the project. Swiffy was
born!
Today we’re making the first version of Swiffy available on Google
Labs. You can upload a SWF file, and Swiffy will produce an HTML5 version which will
run in modern browsers with a high level of SVG support such as Chrome and Safari. It’s still
an early version, so it won’t convert all Flash content, but it already works well on ads and
animations. We have some examples of
converted SWF files if you want to see it in action.
Swiffy
uses a compact JSON representation of the animation, which is rendered using SVG and a bit of
HTML5 and CSS3. ActionScript 2.0 is also present in the JSON object, and is interpreted in
JavaScript in the browser. This representation makes the Swiffy animations almost as compact
as the original SWF files.
Swiffy is a great example of how far the web
platform has come. Swiffy animations benefit from the recent advancements in JavaScript
execution speed and hardware accelerated 2D graphics in the browser. Viva la Web!
Update Sep. 8, 2011: links updated to reflect Swiffy's move out of
Labs.
Marcel Gordon is the Product Manager for
Swiffy, doing the make-up and carrying the drinks. On the weekends he dresses up as a pirate
and takes his hamster for short walks.
