Two weeks ago I told you about SmokeScreen, which is a solution for playing flash files on the iDevices by converting Flash to JavaScript/HTML5. Artefact has created a different solution for playing flash on the iPad, he calls it, Flash In a Pinch. The Flash In a Pinch concept is still not very fast and there is no sound yet, but it’s a great start.

Boiled down, this is a web-based thin client and, since it offloads the rendering to a back-end capable of running any plugin, we’re also able to render Silverlight, Unity3D and other plugins. I gotta say: it’s a bit of a trip to see Silverlight (such as the Artefact Animator) on an iPad.

We’re using Google’s open source Chrome browser (Chromium) to render images on a server and transmitting the image to Safari. Using Javascript on an overlaid layer, we’re able to send all touch interactions to the server and react to them, making it fully interactive.

On the downside, this requires more CPU time on the server and it’s not as fast as running Flash directly would be. Also, this only delivers images, currently. We’re working on a version that speeds up delivery by using the h.264 codec to deliver images and sound.

Source [modmyi and Artefact]