The problem with Adobe’s Flash for most consumers, as anyone with an Apple iPhone/iPad is acutely aware of, is that it is not universally supported by all mobile platforms. Google’s Android OS didn’t get Flash until version 2.2 and there is still some time to go yet before support is added to the tablet-centric 3.0 Honeycomb update, but the runaway success of Apple’s iDevices has left a sizable number of mobile tech users without access to chunks of the Internet.
Apple has instead put a big push behind the less hardware-intensive HTML5, which a number of popular websites — notably YouTube — have converted to or offer support for. In recognition of this, Adobe has pulled back the veil on an experimental file conversion application called Wallaby which is designed to turn your Flash files into HTML. It is a developer-focused release, so you won’t be able to put this on your phone and start browsing through Flash-driven pages.
Instead, the intent with this initial offering is to give advertisers a workable solution for bringing their Flash-based ads to iOS devices, as it says in the Wallaby release notes. Awesome. That Flash-driven website still gives you the frowny face icon whenever you load it, but at least the Extenze ad at the top of the page is fully animated!
In all seriousness, this is at least a first step. The initial release of Wallaby doesn’t support the conversion of ActionScript, movies or sound, but Adobe is working on implementing these features and more. For now the application simply takes your supported Flash content and converts it to a mix of HTML, CSS and JavaScript code, which can then be edited or simply dropped into a webpage.
