Legalese Flash and Generator are acknowledged trademarks of Macromedia Corporation.
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Transcript of Legalese Flash and Generator are acknowledged trademarks of Macromedia Corporation.
Legalese
Flash and Generator are acknowledged trademarks of
Macromedia Corporation
Contents
• About the SWF file format
• The need for manipulation tools
• The problems encountered
• Achievements
• Applications
• The future
• Conclusion
About theSWF file format
Flash?
• A little bit of History– FutureSplash was originally
created by FutureWave– FutureWave bought by MacroMedia,
FutureSplash renamed Flash– current version is 5– Flash file format (SWF) was
open-sourced in 1998
Flash? cont.
• Vector animation format– shapes and lines
– bitmaps (JPEGs, PNGs)
– sounds (ADPCMs, MP3s)
• These are known as objects– analogous to actors,
scenery and soundtrack
Flash? cont.
• Keeping with the film analogy– SWF format is a script to describe
and control the ‘actors’
– divided into frames
– frames divided into tags• these define and control objects
– 34 different tags, using 17 data-types
Flash? cont.
• Web Oriented– highly compressed
– plug-in
– pseudo-streaming
Flash? cont.
• Scriptable– control events, within movie
– reactive, not truly dynamic
The Idea
• I needed– a tool for manipulating Flash files
– a way of creating Flash files from scratch
– some way of converting between formats• abstract representation
The need for manipulation tools
Why?
• Can’t create totally dynamic content– prevents uses on
database applications
• Because it’s complicated– it can’t be used within other
applications, the facilities don’t exist– you can't do some things
with the existing interface
• Storing SWF binary is not always appropriate
The Competition
• Macromedia Generator– limited
• modification not creation
– expensive (very)• and you still need Flash Authoring tool
– slow
– resource intensive
The Competition cont.
• Ming– enemy of flash
– unfinished, only generates
– not low level enough
The Competition cont.
• Middlesoft SDK– limited to C++ on Windows
– complicated
– restrictive licensing
– creation only
Problems encountered
Problems
• Specification was wrong– required experimentation– incomplete, only dealt with version 3
• Very few knowledgeable people– NDAs– lack of community
• Text representation• libswf very unstable
– author unavailable
Achievements
Achievements
SWFParser
AbstractObject
SWFWriter
Applications
Applications
• Broadband access– richer interfaces
• Database driven flash websites– e.g. animated weather maps
• Batch generation– personalised invitations
Applications cont.
• Library for flash authoring application
• Extraction of resources – images, sound, text
• Conversion between other formats– save as SVG and MNG
The future
Future Work
• Improve interface to the Object– simplify– functions for various effects
• Update Libraries to Flash 5– legalities of reverse engineering
• More Input/Output filters– improve the ones already done
Conclusions
Conclusions
• A lot has been achieved– but things still to do
• Interest from industry and community
• Many real-world applications
• Development will continue
Conclusions cont.
• Structure is sound
• Perl was appropriate– good support from user base
– hundreds of pre-built libraries
– performance issues
