04.08.08 - oops

I forgot about testing this on Linux. Should work now. :)

04.08.07 - printf("hello world");

Well, here it is, the Flash player code I've been dabbling with off and on (but mostly off) for the last three years. It's not currently in a very usable state yet—I'm releasing it so I'll be more motivated to get it working, because it won't ever happen at the current rate of development.

So what's the deal?

Flirt is, simply, an SWF rendering library. Flirt contains a parser for reading SWF format files, a rasterizer for rendering the vector shapes into bitmaps, and an actionscript engine. Just hook it up to a timer and you've got a player. Interface your system UI events into the hooks provided and it's interactive. Present your application code to the player as actionscript objects and you've got a scriptable, cross-platform UI.

Flirt is distributed under GPL, the GNU General Public License (because it's good enough for now, not because I agree with much of anything RMS says). See the LICENSE file for details.

How's development going, then?

Slowly.

I've got a day job that keeps me from spending more time on this. So, yes, by asking you for feedback on Flirt, I'm surrendering that last little bit of free time not spent in front of a computer.

I'm currently developing Flirt on OS X with Xcode, but it builds on the command line with a Makefile. Older versions ran on cygwin, using SDL for the graphics interface, and it probably won't take much work to get that running again.

So what do you want from us?

Feedback, bugs, ideas, suggestions. Is there anything you'd really like to see Flirt do (besides just, y'know, work)? Please let me know!

I've submitted this for a SourceForge project, but that hasn't gone through yet. When it does, there will be a mailing list and bug tracker and feature request tracker and CVS and everything else that's supposed to make our lives easier.