Adobe’s job is to help you solve problems, not to get hung up on one technology vs. another.
Millions of people have honed their Web animation skills in Flash, and now their customers want content that can run anywhere, including on non-Flash-enabled devices. Accordingly Adobe’s releasing “Wallaby,” an experimental Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool. For now it’s aimed at WebKit-based browsers (notably Safari & Chrome):
The focus for this initial version of Wallaby is to do the best job possible of converting typical banner ads to HTML5. Wallaby does a good job of converting graphical content along with complex, timeline-based animation to HTML5 in a form that can be viewed with browsers using a WebKit rendering engine. Supported WebKit browsers include Chrome and Safari on OSX, Windows, and iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod).
Wallaby’s design goal was not to produce final-form HTML ready for deployment to web pages. Instead it focuses on converting the rich animated graphical content into a form that can easily be imported into other web pages in development with web page design tools like Dreamweaver.
The tool is new & presently limited (e.g. no ActionScript conversion), but the team welcomes your feedback on how it should evolve.
Having come here specifically to build standards-based Web animation software*, I’m delighted to see this release and a ton of other HTML5 initiatives from Adobe. As long as the company puts solving customer needs ahead of politics, I predict good things.
Update: Here’s the original demo from Wallaby’s sneak peek back in October:
* Back then, in 2000, we were assured that widespread SVG support was *riiiight* around the corner. Sometimes it takes a while for reality to catch up with on-paper standards; c’est la guerre.
Welcome, Wallaby!
Now I can’t wait for LiveMotion CS6 (code name wallaroo)
Cool – to bad theres no video, sound and action support – right now. Thumps up for adobe for releasing this, was it the same tool showed at MAX? If it was what happened in the mean time? 🙂
Great stuff!
Can’t wait to test it. (But I’m too busy in the next days [to weeks 🙁 ])
Martin
Cool!
I’ve been looking for a way to bring back all of those blinking and intrusive banner ads that disappeared after I disabled Flash!
You did not really blame *flash* for those banners, did you? Instead blame the site owner that allows unnerving types of ads. Or blame the companies that think they need this kind of attention.
A very interesting development, alongside other cross platform (SVG/Flash/Javascript/HTML5) enablers like Haxe, SVG Web etc
at last, time to start some testing on my website 🙂
Great Tool
I tried an old animation done in flash MX 2004
Had to first save fla to CS5 and it converted successfully. Some basic actioncript for animation interactivity would be wonderful.
What do have, a bunch of wizards over there?
This rocks. Now we can leverage Flash to bang out animations, transitions, rollovers and drop them into the html5 framework in a fraction of the time it would take to do the same things manually. Huge. Please thank the dev team for me!
that´s the right way –
to convert flash files to html 5!
is there a way to support actionscript?
i hope so! because that´s the best adobe
can do for the future!
great idea!!!
John,
I’ve criticized Adobe before, but this what Adobe needs to do, not cling to the past but develop tools for the future.
Looking forward to more awesomeness from Adobe. Keep it up.
WM
Actually it brute force dumps a pile of SVG items when it could and should use scale and 2d css3 transforms. Looking fwd to that added finesse guys… or some guidance on how to trigger wallaby into converting with that outcome.
[I’m not any kind of HTML expert anymore, and I don’t have a lot of details, but I’ve been told that the app uses SVG to get better rendering performance on mobile Safari (at least relative to Canvas). It would be good to fact-check that belief via the Wallaby forum. –J.]
That’s a big step forward!
Great stuff and, of course, cool name 🙂
great post i’ve just made a new video about this as well now that its out for the public to play with this really cool new feature:
http://stage.everythingfla.com/quickies/wallaby
BFD, can it convert a flash application with user interactivity, database connectivity and video to HTML 5? That would be a game changer.
[You’re right, we should run before we walk. –J.]
Yeah John, come on… My daughter was walking before she started crawling.. the least Adobe could do is put out something that actually does what we really want… sheesh.
I’m pretty stoked about this. I don’t have anything that’s purely animation based anymore since most of what I’ve been asked to build required AS, but still, this is great stuff.