You can crush a man with journalism - William Randolph Hearst
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Adobe releases a Flash to HTML5 converter
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Adobe has released an experimental Flash to HTML5 converter that might create a quantum rip in Steve Jobs' space time continuum.
Designed to patch a video codec hole in the Flash and HTML5 wars, the experimental technolology is dubbed, er, Wallaby.
First shown at the Adobe Max 2010 conference, Wallaby "converts the artwork and animation contained in Adobe Flash Professional (FLA) files into HTML," claims Adobe.
That means users can reuse content on any device that doesn't support the Flash runtimes, such as anything made by Apple.
When the files have been converted to HTML, they can be edited using an editing tool. The conversion result can be viewed on any IOS device.
Will it please Saint Steve? Well, it was originally developed to enable advertisers to get their Flash pop-ups displaying on Ithings, giving Apple a few dollars more to add to its $60 billion cash pile.
Bless Adobe for making more moves to appease camp cappuccino. Last year it produced a widget that allowed HTML5 video support for browsers. That was about the same time that Steve Jobs' reality distortion field was at full warp as he claimed that HTML5 was the most popular video codec on the web.
Wallaby is available now as a free download. µ
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is at full strength. Apple said that they didn't want Flash because Adobe had yet to show them a version that works well on a mobile device. That still holds true as far as I can see (I tried to view a video on a Tegra 2 powered Android tablet recently, one recently certified with the latest Flash player - nothing complicated just a BBC news report - and it crashed the browser). On that basis moves towards providing more content in HTML5 is a good thing (even if it's adds).
Second point, Apple don't make any money from third party adds shown in the web browser, be that text, animated GIFs or HTML5.
Third point HTML5 IS NOT A CODEC. PART of the HTML5 spec allows you to embed video (encoded in either h.264 - Flash video also encodes in h.264 BTW so you don't need to transcode - or WebM formats, but iOS can't play WebM) in a web page.
Final point, Apple said that more than 50% of video content was viewable in HTML5 pages, and given that YouTube, Vimeo etc support then they are probably correct on a per clip if not a per website basis. That's not the same as claiming that it was the most popular format.
Hopefully the converted HTML5 won't require some kind of Adobe propretiery player as well which might proove to be a pile of crap as big as the Flash player. Imagine you'd have to configure your locally stored HTML5 settings by having to go to a remote Adobe website.