Gnash

Chuckie Egg, an old BBC Micro game recreated in Flash, playing in Gnash 0.8.7.

A YouTube video in Gnash 0.8.7. Some videos and most embedded clips still use an ActionScript 2.0 player, which still works fine.

3D Tetris in Gnash 0.8.7.

Since SWF6 it has been possible to generate gradient fills dynamically using ActionScript. Version 0.8.7 of Gnash will have support for these gradients. The attached screenshot shows them working in Gnash, or see the original code and SWF. SWF8 ... [More] added more options to gradient fills. Gnash 0.8.7 does not support these, but it would be possible to add some or all of that support. If you are interested in having this functionality, please contact me! [Less]

Another improvement in Gnash 0.8.7 is its memory optimized XML parsing and much better compatibility. The XML and XMLNode classes in ActionScript 2 allow parsing and handling of XML trees. Mostly they are used for configuration data or relatively ... [More] limited dynamically-loaded content. But sometimes - one example is openstreetmap.org's "potlatch" editor - the XML can have many thousands of nodes. read more [Less]

Our next release of Gnash, 0.8.7, is due in February, and it comes with plenty of changes. This is the first of a couple of posts explaining what I've been working on since the last release and where you can expect improvements. The inflexible design ... [More] we inherited from GameSWF is gradually improving to the point where Gnash almost has a stable API for some of its central classes. You still can't rely on it staying the same, but the better design that's emerging (and the fact that Gnash has a design at all now) means that any changes should be limited. read more [Less]

Haikuzone reports that Gnash runs quite nicely on the Haiku operating system, an open-source implementation of the defunct operating system BeOS. Since there is no official Haiku release of the proprietary Adobe Flash player (and quite likely never will be), Gnash is the only way to see some web content for Haiku users.

Gnash apparently runs in Google's new(ish) web browser, so for flash-addicts who insist on using Chrome, see http://www.rootninja.com/adobe-flash-support-google-chrome-beta-using-gn... for a howto!

Here is an interesting example of Gnash's flexibility (and what you can do with some sideways thinking): http://www.youtube.com/user/gershon#p/a/u/0/CAPzIm1hsNQ Gnash is used with some lua bindings to render a flash movie inside a 3-D game. This ... [More] makes it possible to use any SWF as an interactive UI that can be developed and tested outside the game - even in a web browser. [Less]

A recent post on OpenGeoData blog presents Potlatch 2: "Fully rewritten in ActionScript 3". ActionScript 3 !? Wait, that means NO more access for free software users! read more