Hundreds of thousands of files have been converted already

Sep 9, 2011 16:41 GMT  ·  By

A couple of months back, Google unveiled an interesting little experiment, a tool for converting Flash animation into HTML5. It wasn't the only one trying to do it, even Adobe is working on something similar, but Google's tool, Swiffy, managed to get quite a lot of attention.

Swiffy was incorporated into Google Labs, since it was an experimental tool, but now that Labs is shutting down it had to find a new home.

It not only managed to do that, but it's also gotten some new capabilities making even more animation conversions possible.

"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)," Pieter Senster, the Google software engineer behind the project, wrote.

Swiffy now boasts some new features which should enable it to accurately convert even more Flash animations into standard web formats.

"For example, Swiffy now supports shape tweening and drop shadow, blur and glow filters, all using SVG, CSS and JavaScript," Senster said.

"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," he added.

Swiffy is still in beta, so you can't expect it to convert any Flash animation yet. What's more, Swiffy is only aimed at animations and simple interactions, not complex Flash apps.

But it seems that the tool managed to raise quite a lot of interest in the community, Google boasts that hundreds of thousands of files have been converted using the online tool.

With the rapid development process and the clear interest in the tool, Google may be onto a winner with Swiffy. And all of those people using Flash for banner ads will be thankful.