Google Updates Swiffy Flash-to-HTML5, Other Tools

Google has introduced or updated a series of tools to help developers, including an extension of its Swiffy Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool.

Google launched Swiffy in July 2011 and it enables developers to convert Flash SWF files to HTML5. In a recent blog post, Esteban de la Canal, a software engineer on the Swiffy team at Google, said, “One of our main aims for Swiffy is to let you continue to use Flash as a development environment, even when you’re developing animations for environments that don’t support Flash.”

Now, “To speed up the development process, we’ve built the Swiffy Extension for Flash Professional,” de la Canal said. “The extension enables you to convert your animation to HTML5 with one click (or keyboard shortcut). The extension is available for both Mac and Windows, and it uses Swiffy as a Web service, so you’ll always get our latest and greatest conversion. Information about the conversion process is shown within Flash Professional.”

Also, Google announced early in November that it has open-sourced its sfntly font programming library. Created by the Google Internationalization Engineering team, the sfntly Java and C++ library makes it easy for programmers to build high-performance font manipulation applications and services, said Stuart Gill, a sfntly architect at Google, in a Nov. 18 blog post.

“Now, both Java and C++ programmers can use sfntly to quickly and easily develop code to read, edit and subset OpenType and TrueType fonts,” Gill said. “The Google Web Fonts team uses the Java version to dynamically subset fonts, and the Chrome/Chromium browser uses the C++ version to subset fonts for PDF printing.”

In addition, Google has introduced a new tool to help Web developers manage Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The new tool is a companion to Google’s Closure Tools, which the company delivered two years ago to give Web developers the ability to organize and optimize their JavaScript and HTML in a new way. However, Michael Bolin, an open-source engineer at Google, said there was a missing piece to the puzzle, which Google has delivered with Closure Stylesheets.

In a recent blog post, Bolin said:

“Closure Stylesheets is an extension to CSS that adds variables, functions, conditionals and mix-ins to standard CSS. The tool also supports minification, linting, RTL flipping and CSS class renaming. As the existing Closure Tools have done for JavaScript and HTML, Closure Stylesheets will help you write CSS in a maintainable way, while also empowering you to deliver optimized code to your users.”

In other open-source news, Google announced that it has open-sourced all the Google Plug-in for Eclipse (GPE), including GWT Designer, under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) v1.0. GPE is a set of software-development tools that enables Java developers to quickly design, build, optimize and deploy cloud-based applications using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Speed Tracer, App Engine and other Google Cloud services, Eric Clayberg, a Google engineer, said in a recent blog post.