Mark DuBois Weblog

I received the Adobe Education Leader Impact Award last month. The actual plaque arrived today. Thought I would share this on my weblog. I am incredibly honored to receive this award from my peers. For those who are not familiar, the Adobe Education Leaders program spans many continents. We have the opportunity to gather once a year in San Jose. We also get to work closely with a number of incredible people from Adobe. Part of the rationale for my nomination included the work I do every year with the WOW Web Design contest (both for the state of Illinois and for the national competition held in Kansas City), various webinars and seminars I have given over the past few years, my work on the AEL Advisory Board,  and for my contributions to the Adobe Education Exchange. In addition to the award, I received a gift certificate (which I used to partly cover the costs of my new DSLR camera – Nikon D3100). Thanks again to those who nominated me and for all the great experiences I have had as an Adobe Education Leader. It is quite an honor just to work with so many talented, passionate and dedicated individuals.

Adobe recently released “Wallaby” via their labs website. This is a technology which converts Flash (.fla) files to HTML (HTML5). Of course, only modern browsers will be able to display the results (sorry IE 6, 7, and 8). The images rendered are SVG images (a fair number for shape tweens). Obviously Wallaby is a work in progress. I installed this on a virtual Win XP Pro region.  It does require the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) to be installed prior to actually installing Wallaby. Wallaby runs as a 32 bit AIR application. After a successful install, when one opens the tool, one is presented with a screen like the following. One provides the Flash (.fla) file and converts it to HTML. Pretty straight forward. Adobe also provides technical tips (so you can extend the generated results).

Note that Wallaby can also be run form the command line (but I chose to work with the GUI as I don’t have a lot of fla files to convert).

A number of features are not presently supported in the current version. More details can be found in the release notes.  This includes Actionscript. Similarly text and strokes are partially supported and only shape tweens are supported in full. I provide links to a couple of examples just  so you can compare the results. Note that these examples have both the Flash as well as the resulting HTML included so you can better compare for yourself (don’t forget to view the source code). Most of these examples are best viewed in Safari or Chrome (WebKit based browsers).

• Simple graphic (will open in a new browser window/ tab)
• Frame by frame animation (will also open in new window/ tab)
• Shape tween (likewise will open in new browser window/ tab)

These are just some starting examples of what can be done with Wallaby. As time permits, I hope to be able to add to these examples. For those students who ask about actual uses of XML, I also noted that all the logs generated are XML files.