Flash In A Pinch : Artefact Brings Flash To Your iPad

[Nick Hesson]

Getting Flash On the iPad With a Different Approach

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwtQefApuHQ[/ame]

Hulu on the iPad


A couple weeks ago Paul wrote an article discussing Smokescreen, a plugin that brought Flash to the iPhone. The Smokescreen app 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.

Flash In a Pinch, brought to you by Artefact, takes a different approach at brewing up flash for your iPad.

Boiled down, this is a web-based thin client and, since it offloads the rendering to a back-end capable of running any plugin, we’re also able to render Silverlight, Unity3D and other plugins. I gotta say: it’s a bit of a trip to see Silverlight (such as the Artefact Animator) on an iPad.

We’re using Google’s open source Chrome browser (Chromium) to render images on a server and transmitting the image to Safari. Using Javascript on an overlaid layer, we’re able to send all touch interactions to the server and react to them, making it fully interactive.

On the downside, this requires more CPU time on the server and it’s not as fast as running Flash directly would be. Also, this only delivers images, currently. We’re working on a version that speeds up delivery by using the h.264 codec to deliver images and sound.

Before you get too excited however, just like the last paragraph says, its not going to be very fast. The delivery method, combined with the CPU power and bandwidth requires quite a bit of juice, and until the h.264 version comes out, this is still very "proof of concept". Just watch the video and you'll see.

Via Engadget and Artefact

[DisneyRicky]

So we have flash!?

[cypherpunk]

So this is basically Cloudbrowse for iPad?

I've actually found that app surprisingly usable for watching basic Flash animations on Newgrounds.

[GellBrake'rrrr]

Great to see the beginnings of such a beautiful experience! Keep up the good work!!!

[whereswaldo]

will it be coming out for iPhone?

[iPhone3G[S]]

They should take this same approach on a jailbroken device, but use the ipad its self as the server...

[z3r01]

But doesn't ten server need to know how to read flash which is the reason that the app is cloud based...so the ipad as a server wouldn't work which is why they does it likes so son lol enough urban talk for me

[sharp2G]

How does this work if it doesn't require a jailbreak or application?

How are users going to get this on their ipads and iPhones?

[PapaJohnX]

It needs to be native, no servers in between. Grrrr

[CMOSlabs]

Work in progress, love it! Crank up the wifi N, wheres that fiber optic dock for the iPhone? iPhone 4 with Wifi N. Counting the days Guess it will have to do Sometime in the future we will see Flash on iSuff. Wait a minute, I get Flash with the Cloud Flash thing. Well its a start.

[EliteApple]

so do we have this, whats the website? or are they being dumb and not realeasing something that clearly works?

[tnsai]

The.only dumb ones here are people who didn't read the article about how this is currently at concept level.

[kwall]

If i read this properly I think the best route would be the dev to allow the end user to run their own server at home as well loading the page on the server and stream it locally

[CaptainChaos]

This is a step in the right direction. I do not use flash, but for some reason there seems to be a need for it.

[thetoothfairy]

This is a step in the right direction. I do not use flash, but for some reason there seems to be a need for it.

Yeah so people can play Farmville! lol

[iNT3Rv3NTiONZz]

wow that is sweet cannot wait until the coding changes are made to make it better!
now all i need is an iPad lol..

[CaptainChaos]

Yeah so people can play Farmville! lol

Lol this is true!

[lolcats1]

the framerate is still really poor. these kind of things are good for audio, but video is still pretty laggy. shame

[T4R06]

That will suck your battery.. Personally, i dont like it

[Schadde]

Farmville will have it's own app soon. Remember the keynote? :P