Make your Flash contents playable on iPhone with Swiffy

Ever since Steve Jobs termed Flash as a dying technology and confirmed that they don’t have any such plans of supporting Flash - “we don’t spend a lot of energy on old technology”, there were many attempts to make the flash content playable on devices running iOS. Some of them succeeded to some extent. Google has taken a step on this direction to promote open technologies. Google has pushed a new product into Google Labs – Swiffy, a SWF to HTML5 converter. This product from Google is definitely much better. This labs product allows you to upload a SWF file, and it will produce an HTML5 version which will run in modern browsers with a high level of SVG support such as Chrome and Safari.

Highlights

• Swiffy animations are almost as compact as that of the original SWF files. Swiffy uses a compact JSON representation of the animation, which is rendered using SVG and a bit of HTML5 and CSS3.
• Swiffy animations take advantage of the advancements in JavaScript execution speed and hardware accelerated 2D graphics.
• Supports a bunch of user interactions apart from the plain old animations.
• Wide range of browser support. Check out the browsers supporting SVG here.

Try it out yourself here. Check out the gallery of converted SWF files.

-- Varun

Google Indic Music Search

Google has made the search more musical when it announced Google Music Search about an year back. But, then, the service was available only in the U.S. Today, Google India has launched a new labs product “Indic Music Search”. It allows you to search for music by artists, albums or songs. Though the description of the Indic Music Search says that only Hindi songs are available, few other regional languages can also be found using this search.

Google does not host the music files for you. It has partnered with in.com, saavn and saregama to stream the contents to the users. If you are an existing user of any of these services, probably, nothing new for you here. Flash player is needed to play the music straight from your browser.

(Via @Peeyush)

-- Varun

[GoogleLabs] Script Converter, Scribe and Breadcrumb

Google Labs is a playground where users can play with some of the cool experiments done at Google. Once the idea / product gets stabilized, they will be graduated from the labs. Some of the products graduated from the labs include Google Maps, Google Suggest, Google Reader, etc. Script Converter, Scribe and Breadcrumb are some of the tools recently launched in the labs. Try them out today.

Script Converter

Script Converter is an awesome tool which allows you to read a text / a complete web page in a script of your choice. This does not translate the text. This will be handy if a person can speak a particular language but can not read / write in that language. For example, I can understand spoken Telugu but can not read / write Telugu scripts. If I want to read a Telugu web page, this tool will help me to view the page in English scripts. The tool can also auto-detect the scripts used on a site. Open the twitter page of @agaraadhi. Check out the same page with English script here.

Scribe

Scribe is an auto-completion tool which was launched last month. It provides text completion suggestions based on the information already typed in the document. This also helps in saving the keystrokes. Scribe is available as a Chrome extension as well and can be used as a auto-completion on all the web pages.

 Breadcrumb 

Breadcrumb is a less known tool on Google Labs which enables you to create a variety of mobile learning applications and allows you to make your application work with only few annotations to the plain text. Annotations can be used to control the flow of text in the application. It provides an interface where in you can type the text and a mobile application will be created based on the annotated text. User guide / documentation is not available yet. Some of the use cases of this tool could be 1. Help data-center technicians troubleshoot problems on the datacenter floor. 2. Decision making system for the new employees of a team 3. Alternative for flow charts. () and [] are the annotations supported so far. click on the screenshot below to know more about the syntax.

-- Varun