Adobe Releases Flash to HTML 5 Converter Wallaby

Adobe President and CEO Narayen — The rising popularity of HTML5 and the declining dominance of Flash will spell tougher times ahead for Creative Suite (CS) and naturally for Adobe Systems. REUTERS

Adobe has released its Flash to HTML 5 conversion tool, codenamed Wallaby.

Wallaby is an application to convert Adobe Flash Professional CS5 files (.FLA) to HTML5 and its primary design goals were to get the best quality and performance on browsers within iOS devices like iPhone and iPad.

Wallaby has a very simple user interface, which accepts as input a FLA file and exports HTML and support files to a user-selected folder. There is also an option to launch the default application assigned for the .html extension, Adobe said.

The focus for this initial version of Wallaby is to do the best job possible of converting typical banner ads to HTML5 and supported Webkit browsers include Chrome and Safari on OSX, Windows, and iOS.

Meanwhile, Apple has improved the performance of its Safari browser in its software update to iOS 4.3 by adding the Nitro JavaScript engine, which runs JavaScript up to twice as fast as in iOS 4.2.2 allowing faster page loads.

Adobe said its conversion tool allows reusing and extending the reach of one's content to devices that do not support the Flash runtimes. Once these files are converted to HTML, a user can edit them with an HTML editing tool, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, or by hand if desired.

Adobe makes it clear that 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.

However, this initial version of Wallaby offers no support for conversion of ActionScript, Movies and Sound.

Wallaby is delivered as a stand-alone native AIR application installer and is a 32-bit application available for both Windows and Macintosh platforms.

Wallaby for Macintosh will work on both OS 10.5 and 10.6 although primary testing was with 10.6. For Windows, it will work with Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP although primary testing was with Windows 7.

Following table shows the features supported and unsupported by Wallaby:

Feature	Implementation	Status	Notes
3D transforms		Unsupported
ActionScript 1,2		Unsupported
ActionScript 3		Unsupported
Blend Modes		Unsupported	Unsupported by HTML or CSS
Button - visuals (normal, hover, active)	SVG, CSS	Complete	Buttons inside of a button are not supported
Button - events		Unsupported	Requires JavaScript for actions
Compiled Clips		Unsupported	Requires Actionscript support
Components		Unsupported	Most require Actionscript and Compiled Clip support
Fills - gradients or images	SVG	Complete
Fills - solid colors	SVG	Complete
Filters (DropShadow, Glow, Blur, ColorMatrix)	SVG	Unsupported	Supported by SVG but not Safari and Safari Mobile
Filters - Advanced (Bevel, Gradient Bevel/Glow)		Unsupported	No SVG, HTML, or CSS support
FrameSets	HTML and Javascript	Complete
Gradients	SVG	Complete
Images	HTML or SVG	Complete	A few formats have issues with alpha
Inverse Kinematics		Unsupported	Right click on the Armature and select 'Convert to Frame by Frame Animation'
Layers - Art/Normal	SVG	Complete
Layers - Folder		Complete
Layers - Guide		Complete
Layers - Mask	SVG Mask Artwork, Webkit Clip	Partial	No support for multiple framesets in Mask layer, several Webkit bugs
Scale 9 graphics		Unsupported	Need to dynamically scale
Paths - Cubic & Quadratic	SVG	Complete
Scenes		Complete
Sound - Stream, Event		Unsupported
Strokes - gradients or images		Unsupported
Strokes - solid colors	SVG	Partial	No advanced dashing (i.e. Dotted, Hatched, Stippled, Ragged)
Text - Classic Static	SVG	Partial	Text Limitations
Text - Classic Dynamic, Input	SVG	Partial	Text Limitations
Text - Font Embedding	SVG	Complete	Text Limitations
Text - TLF	SVG	Partial	Text Limitations
Timelines		Partial	Nested timelines difficult and there are a few known bugs
Tweening - Shape		Complete	One SVG file is created for each frame of a Shape Tween. This can cause a large number of SVG files for complex animations using Shape Tween leading to playback performance issues on iOS devices. Some of the complex cases may not convert correctly.