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I have many clients with Flash interfaces that they like quite a bit. But these things don't work on many (most?) mobile devices. This is a two part question:

  1. If I get access to the original .fla files, is there a way to bulk export/compile Flash into individual images with hotspots?

  2. If I don't have access to the original .fla is there a mechanism to turn a .swf into a format friendly to webkit devices?

Comment: My fear is that I'll be left with either recreating the interface entirely or building something all-new. It would be nice to have some automated options in terms of making sites more non-Flash available (possibly HTML5? possibly tailored to WebKit? possibly tailored to other mobile platforms?).

Keep in mind, I love Flash, not looking to bash Flash, trying to see options for existing Flash content.

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I think your best bet long term will be to completely rebuild/recreate the interface. I suspect that any automated or even semi-automated tool for converting flash elements to something more widely accessible will leave you with lots and lots of cruft, and make future maintenance more difficult and time-consuming.

My suggestion is to rebuild, and perhaps use some existing flash elements for the most complex portions of the sites, while putting some sort of fall back functionality into place for mobile browsers that do not support flash.

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I don't think it's fully released yet, but you might want to check out Smokescreen. It's a Flash rendering engine written entirely in Javascript and HTML5. It is being created with one of its goals being to allow Flash to be used on platforms without native support (such as certain mobile devices).

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  • Very cool. I remember seeing the StrongBad email demo but I thought the version of swf supported was much older than Flash 8. Still not ready for use, but promising nonetheless!
    – artlung
    Jul 15, 2010 at 9:31
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Right now it looks like CS5 can do the conversions from flash to HTML5 but you would need the flash files and it would take some work still it sounds like. Check out this article for more, http://cs5.org/?p=3#more-3. I think going to HTML5 is probably your only real choice because of functionality.

However, you are probably going to have to wait a while for HTML5 to really be fully support so you will have to be careful with what functionality you are moving over. I know as of right now Chrome is the closest browser to having all of the HTML% capabilities and it scores a mere 221 out of 300 on http://html5test.com/.

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  • Yeah, we're in a tricky state with regards to Flash vs HTML5 vs (Silverlight maybe?) vs Native apps. It actually feels like the old browser wars a little. Interesting to see how it shakes out.
    – artlung
    Jul 15, 2010 at 9:33

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