Flash without the plugin
Back in January, Tobias Schneider released an open source Flash runtime written in javascript called Gordon.. It allows you to run a Flash .swf file in your browser without the Flash plugin. Here’s an example animation. At the time I thought it was a cool toy, but didn’t see much room for it.
Then April came around and the iPad came out. The debate over why the iPad doesn’t support Flash got really loud. Now there’s a product, Smokescreen, making it easy to run Flash banner ads on the iPad and other devices that don’t support Flash.
Take this demo for example. In every browser but Internet Explorer, you’ll see a banner ad running with their product using SVG and below it the same banner in Flash.
If you poke around their demos enough you’ll see some flaws. The non-flash versions don’t always sport all of the fancy drop shadows and other effects that Flash supports. Also, if you look at the Homestar Runner demo, while being really impressive in Chrome and Safari, played at a crawl in Firefox 3.6 for me.
Smokescreen also supports interactivity. Test clicking around here.
I don’t see this product being the end all fix to getting rich advertisements on the iPad with minimal labor due to performance issues. It’ll be interesting to see where things go, though.
From: Smokescreen
posted by Bobby Marko on June 4th, 2010 at 11:21 am Permanent link to this post
One Response to “Flash without the plugin”
Yes, so much talk about JavaScript + HTML5 vs FLASH. We will see what will happen, i thing adobe preparing something good for flash in future that will leave html5 and JavaScript on knees.
Do not forget that html an javascript existed before flash came out, but browser incompatibility was big problem when it comes to complicated stuff which flash now handles well.