New features and a new home for Swiffy

By Pieter Senster, Software Engineer

In June we released Swiffy, an experimental tool to convert Flash to HTML5, on Google Labs. We were thrilled with the response: in the first month, Swiffy users converted hundreds of thousands of files.

We received a lot of feedback from developers after the launch, and we learnt a lot from studying the warnings generated in the conversion process. As a result, we’ve released several improvements over the last few weeks. For example, Swiffy now supports shape tweening and drop shadow, blur and glow filters, all using SVG, CSS and JavaScript. Some of these filters can be seen in action in this Chrome ad (on a browser with SVG filter support).

We’ve also made Swiffy easier to use. You can now convert files of up to 1MB, and you’ll get a QR code to preview the output on a mobile device. We’ve also made it clear that you can host the Swiffy runtime (the JavaScript file that controls the animation) yourself if you need to.

Although Google Labs is winding down, Swiffy will continue to be available. We’re moving Swiffy to a new home: http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy (or, for those in a hurry, g.co/swiffy). Although it’s no longer a Labs product, it is still in beta, so it may not be able to convert all your Flash files, but we’re working to improve it all the time.

Pieter Senster is a Software Engineer on the Swiffy team. He's currently planning his first diving trip to the Great Barrier Reef.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor