This is some great stuff! I'm glad you're able to resolve the more
nebulous descriptions to create something real. I'm still trying to
figure out how this all snuck up on me. Ironically, much of my "real"
job is heavily graphical - mostly GIS/GPS based analysis - but I work
with it at a higher level than the primitives defined in Flash. So I'm
still wading around in the shallow end of the pool here -- but I will
have to jump in soon to create the code/data/object animations I have
dancing around in my head.

Thanks for creating such an interesting and powerful toy^h^h^htool for
Squeakers.

-- Dwight

Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> Dwight,
> 
> > One thing though -- Macromedia is hardly giving away the candy store in
> > their Flash open file format package. The swfparse code is a nice start,
> > but it's hardly a reference implementation is it?
> 
> You're right - the Open-SWF documentation has a lot of inaccurate
> statements and the parse code provided doesn't even work as expected.
> Fortunately, there are couple of people working on similar stuff in the
> (graphics) community and I was able to share my insights with them and so
> figure out how to deal with some of the more strange descriptions from the
> spec.
> 
> > You still get to implement all the primitives yourself.
> 
> Luckily, this is not too hard. The technology that's needed for this dates
> back at least to the 80's (e.g., use a simple scan-line renderer with an
> active edge table approach, couple of lines and quadratic bezier segments,
> a little forward-differencing here and there, and away you go). But today
> we have the processing power to do this with neat anti-aliasing at 10
> frames per second ;-)
> 
>   Andreas