Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Items tagged flash in May

Filters: Month: May × flash × Sorted by date


tobeytailor’s gordon. Another Flash runtime in pure JavaScript project, released back in January. Not quite as advanced as Smokescreen yet (it doesn’t have an audio implementation) but already available as open source under an MIT license. # 29th May 2010, 11:57 am

Smokescreen demo: a Flash player in JavaScript. Chris Smoak’s Smokescreen, “a Flash player written in JavaScript”, is an incredible piece of work. It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG. Open up the Chrome Web Inspector while the demo is running and you can see the SVG changing in real time. Smokescreen even implements its own ActionScript bytecode interpreter. It’s stated intention is to allow Flash banner ads to execute on the iPad and iPhone, but there are plenty of other interesting applications (such as news site infographics). The company behind it have announced plans to open source it in the near future. My one concern is performance—the library is 175 KB and over 8,000 lines of JavaScript which might cause problems on low powered mobile devices. # 29th May 2010, 11:32 am

Realtime Election Tweets. Jay Caines-Gooby’s realtime election tweet service, using Node.js, nginx and WebSocket with a Flash fallback. # 6th May 2010, 9:20 pm

The crisis Flash now faces is that Apple has made it clear that Flash will no longer be ubiquitous, as it won’t exist on the iPhone platform, thus turning “runs everywhere” into “runs almost everywhere.” As Web developers know, “runs almost everywhere” is a recipe for doing everything at least twice.

Rafe Colburn # 5th May 2010, 12:10 pm

Obscure bugs revisited: IE, HTTPS and plugins. Filed for future reference: IE breaks mysteriously if you serve it up plugin content (e.g. Flash) over HTTPS with a no-cache header—it deletes the file from cache before the plugin software gets a chance to open it. # 30th May 2008, 9:54 am

Crossdomain.xml Invites Cross-site Mayhem. A useful reminder that crossdomain.xml files should be treated with extreme caution. Allowing access from * makes it impossible to protect your site against CSRF attacks, and even allowing from a “circle of trust” of domains can be fatal if just one of those domains has an XSS hole. # 15th May 2008, 8:06 am

Adobe and Industry Leaders Establish Open Screen Project (via) Talk about burying the lede... the real story is that Adobe are going to drop the license restriction that prevents other people from implementing SWF players. They’re also publishing the AMF and Flash Cast protocols and removing licensing fees for Flash Player on devices. # 1st May 2008, 9:43 am

SWFUpload. Fantastic Flash widget for handling multiple file uploads with progress indicators; degrades gracefully to a regular HTML upload field. # 16th May 2007, 4:12 pm

The web can eat toolchain bait like this for breakfast.

Mike Shaver # 11th May 2007, 3:43 pm

Poly9 FreeEarth (via) Seriously sexy embedable 3D Flash globe, with a JavaScript API. # 10th May 2007, 9:17 pm

Dell to Offer Ubuntu. That right there is why I find Flex more interesting than Silverlight. # 1st May 2007, 6:39 pm