Google Releases Flash-to-HTML5 Flash Professional Extension

[Rob Williams]

With Adobe's recent decision to halt the development of its Flash mobile variant, the company essentially told the world that the future of the Web is not with Flash, but rather HTML5. While the company will continue to develop Flash on the desktop, mobile devices have to be considered. Without mobile Flash, the future of the technology is bleak, or almost nonexistent. But what about those who design content in Flash for a living? Google hopes to have the answer.

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[marfig]

Adobe itself has been offering it's own Flash-to-HTML5 extension since March, dubbed Wallaby.

It seems Adobe ended up realizing Steve Jobs was right when he panned Flash performance and battery usage on mobile devices. More, Wallaby seemed then a sort of pre-announcement to the removal of a flash player for mobile devices.

I'm unclear as to which tool does a better job. I'm hearing reports Swiffty makes a mess of the resulting code and is only guaranteed to work on WebKit browsers, whereas Wallaby seems to be none of those things. But until I see it for myself I won't be trusting user reports on comment boxes.

But regardless it should be interesting to see how the push to HTML5 succeeds in the upcoming years. Seems inevitable really. And these tools will cater for a large part of the flash content out there (simple animations and banner ads).

Adobe seems to be entirely focused on AIR and it seems the company is realizing Flash cannot compete with HTML5. Eventually Flash developers, some of which tend to be slow on the uptake -- there's still Action Script 2.0 banner ads out there! -- will get the message.