News

July 4, 2008: Lately I've been working on a virtual world/MMOG/visual chat in SWFC. Here's what I have so far. It's a work-in-progress and not a huge amount of coding, but it ought to be useful to somebody.

May 23, 2008: I've found a blog entry on another site detailing how to make a flash menu with SWFC. (Part 2) There's a link to it now on the code page.

May 15, 2008: Short new code example for making a basic Banner Ad. Example using button(s) and getURL() (and a certain caveat SWFC has with it).

Free Flash Software

This site focuses on providing documentation, examples, and support for those trying to make Adobe Flash animations using Matthias Kramm's open-source SWFTools package. SWFTools is a collection of different tools for converting files to SWF format, extracting information about existing SWF files, and making completely new SWF files with simple scripting. SWFC is the scripting compiler for SWFTools, allowing you to make flash movies without using Adobe's software at all. The flash header for this site was made using SWFC and required only 15 lines of scripting. You can download SWFTools from swftools.org.

Why SWFTools/SWFC?

There are a few other usable open-source tools for making flash, and there are probably things that they do much better than SWFC. I've chosen to concentrate mostly on SWFC since it's pretty high-level (a few lines of code go a long way), is cross-platform, has a large amount of usable flash features, and is being actively developed.