Done, 3 months of silence. It’s feeling weird to get a lot of press after being able to play Youtube and then not getting anything else done for a lot of time. But as noted in a previous blog post, I wanted to clean up the codebase. That is done now. Swfdec 0.5.0 “Meet Plan Party” is out. It should be equivalent in functionality to the last 0.4 release, but if you find any regressions, please file a bug, as I’m sure we’ve missed something.
What improvements does it offer the user? Some Flash files are less broken than they used to be, but in general, there’s not much changes. There is definitely no new Flash sites I can advertise as working.
What has changed is development. The code got way simpler and it’s much easier now to implement a missing feature or fix a broken one. Apparently other people think the same now, as there’s a whole lot of people interested in hacking Swfdec and providing patches. The Swfdec IRC channel grows all the time, too. Thanks guys.
So I guess now that the foundations are up to speed, we can get to implementing lots of new features – at least until we find more stuff that is broken. What I’m after in getting working next is Google Video, better support for Youtube (in particular making the embedded player work), and I want support for the Flash 8 bling features. We’ll see how far we get.
One thing I’d like to see fixed is the low-hanging fruits. There’s a lot of requested features in Swfdec that need to be implemented and it’s not hard to do, but it requires dedicating time to it. In no particular order:
- The command-line player needs to be made a serious application so we can install it. It needs a menu, a .desktop file, etc – all the stuff a good viewer application should have. Currently the only way of quitting it is Ctrl-C in the command line running it.
- Swfdec needs gettext support.
- The Mozilla plugin needs preferences. People want to be able to define (ideally on a per-site basis) if Flash should be played or not and if audio should be used.
- There should be an Epiphany plugin integrating Swfdec more closely.
- Someone needs to write a Konqueror and Webkit plugin. I didn’t find anyone at aKademy willing to do that.
- Swfdec needs a thumbnailer.
Of course I’d also love if someone actually started writing real applications using Swfdec so I’d have a clue if the Swfdec API is sane or what is missing. (Hint: I would really love a GUI to do my tests in.) And of course the Swfdec library itself requires lots of work to. So, anyone interested? The Swfdec API is fully documented and I intend to keep it that way even when I need to expose a lot more API to make your application work.
And one last thing: If you have cool Flash files and think we should know about them so we can make them work in Swfdec, send me a link to the files. Making cool Flash files work is a lot more fun than working on boring ones. And we’ll certainly debug them more thoroughly.
PS: This post got delayed to you by Guadec and FlyBE.