Smokescreen – Flash without the plugin

So your SWFs won’t play on an iPhone/Touch or iPad? If Chris Smoak has anything to do about it, they will albeit in another form. Chris has written a Flash Player in JavaScript (called Smokescreen) that takes Flash objects and converts them to JavaScript in real time. It reads the SWF binary, unzips it in native JavaScript, extracts images and embedded audio, and turns it into base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vectors back together as animated SVG.

Now this looks to be targeted more at online advertising (tweened texts, slides, etc.) than any robust Flash game or anything like that. It’s been said that it includes over 8,000 lines of code and weighs in at 175kb (no biggie in my mind). It’s going to be open-sourced so perhaps it’s performance could be improved.

So this looks like it’s here to bring Flash advertising to Apple devices, not a full-fledged Flash experience. Not sure I’m very keen on that fact myself. No word on what version of ActionScript will be supported, but having read what I’ve seen so far, it looks like it’s more about lightweight experiences than heavy-duty ones.

What is your take?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.