Tired of seeing the lego-like block symbol when you try to browse your favorite Flash-based website on your iOS device? Wallaby, a program produced by Adobe (the creators of Flash itself), may change all that.
Wallaby is an experimental program that turns Flash-based content into HTML5, basically making the content viewable on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Currently, the quality and performance of Wallaby is questionable at best, but once all the kinks are worked out, this tool may make your devices much more versatile on the Web.
Flash is currently a proprietary closed solution for displaying some types of Web content. Most content in Flash is in the form of Web video. YouTube, Vimeo, and most other video websites—as well as some Facebook games, some splash pages for websites, and a whole lot of games—use Flash extensively..
The reason you don’t see many issues on your iOS device on websites is because Web developers have actually made non-Flash-based versions of their websites. These versions may or may not look the same, but they have the goal of making their content viewable on lucrative mobile browsers.
Web developers pour tons of time and money into making Flash-based websites that look great on Web browsers with Flash installed. After all this time they spend on the Flash version, they then pour tons of time and money into a non-Flash-based version to satisfy people who either don’t want to or don’t have the capability to run Flash.
Wallaby has the capability to streamline a lot of the process needed to convert a website to a version compatible with browsers that either don’t have Flash installed or don’t support Flash. For this reason, Wallaby is awesome for those of us who frequent Flash sites but can’t use them on our spiffy new iPads.
Just to note – Wallaby is not yet out of development; it is still considered experimental and may never see the light of day as a real tool, so take all of this with a grain of salt and hope for the best!