News Archive

News and other information more than 12 months old.

02-Jan-2007. Happy New Year!

Version 2.0.5 of Translate AS1 is now available for download. This release contains a couple of bug fixes the most important is the ability to use the var keyword in for..in statements.

Describe SWF 3.1.5 is now available. This release changes the way JPEG images are handled by handling the encoding table and the image data as a single block. Decoding of actions is improved to handle errors and decode sequences which have been obfuscated to defeat Actionscript decompilers.

20-Dec-2006. The web site has been reorganised to make it easier to find everything and to banish the need for Javascript. Credit goes to and inspiration comes from the Python web site for an excellent menu system that makes it easy to find almost anything.

The site contents are pretty much the same but the pages have been split into different topics. New additions include news pages list everything that is going on. Software releases will still be announced in the forum so that you will still receive notifcations when something is posted. Also new is the Tasks page that will show what is currently being worked on and what tasks are planned.

30-Nov-2006. Translate AS1 2.0.4 is now available for download. This release contains the final additions so that Actionscript 1.x is now fully supported. The other big change with this release is the totally overhauled testing tools. Test suites now include 275 file containing sample actionscript - greatly expanding the test coverage of previous releases. release notes.

30-Sep-2006. Version 2.1.4 of Transform SWF is now available for download. This release corrects several fairly serious bugs and contains improvements to the test suites and test data used to verify the p ackage classes. release notes.

Version 3.1.4 of Describe is now available for download. This release contains 2 bug fixes, 1) Decoding of DefineFont and DefineFont2 data structures now uses the offset table providing a more reliable way of inspecting fonts with badly formed glyphs, 2) The application can now initialize correctly when loading user preferences from older releases.

02-Jul-2006. Transform and Translate each have a new table on the "What's New" page giving the timetable for the next scheduled releases. For each release there is a set of Release Notes which describe in more detail the proposed changes: bug fixes, features added, etc.

30-Jun-2006. Version 2.0.3 of Translate AS1 is now available for download. This release has a number of major improvements to the grammar file and fixes a number of bugs. release notes.

The forum containing the latest bug reports for Transform, Translate and Describe will be phased out. All the bug reports can now be found on separate web pages in the main Flagstone Software site. Posting the bugs directly in a web page takes a lot less effort while still preserving some resonably well formatted text to make the reports readable and hopefully comprehensible.

Version 2.1.3 of Transform SWF is now available for download. This release corrects a few minor bugs and general improvements. The TestNG libraries are now included in the release. release notes.

Version 3.1.3 of Describe SWF is now available for download. This release contains a single bug fix that corrects a problem when decoding NewFunction and NewFunction2 actions.

04-Jun-2006. Version 3.1.2 of Describe is now available for download. This release provides improved performance when browsing files containing font definitions - the contents of the Shape are hidden until selected in the tree view in the leftmost panel. This reduces the amount of text displayed. The JTextArea used to display the text is extremely resource hungry and the application would run out of memory when displaying fonts with large numbers of glyphs.

06-Apr-2006. Translate AS1 can now be found on SourceForge. The site is intended for developers working on the project. Here you will find details on the current bug list (the summaries will still be posted to the "Known Issues & Bugs" forum) as well as the tasks currently being worked on and other development related stuff.

03-Apr-2006. Transform SWF Version 2.1.2 is now available for download. This release corrects a number of rather serious bugs, in particular an error in FSCodec that was introduced in version 2.1 when the Transform Utilities classes were merged into the Transform framework. release notes.

After a long time (too long) Translate AS1 2.0.2 is now available for download. This release fixes a lot of bugs. The grammar for the ActionScript is also updated to better support version 1 of the language. The package was also restructured so the layout matches Transform. Testing is now performed with TestNG (you can download copy from http://www.testng.org/). Also included is the set of ActionScript code snippets used to test the compiler. release notes.

13-Mar-2006. Transform 2.1.1 is now available for download. This release fixes the bug when decoding MP3 files that had an ID3 Version 1 block of data at the end of a file. The release also fixes a bug when decoding all MP3 files that was introduced in last week's release release notes.

09-Mar-2006. The Transform SWF project can now be found on berliOS. The site is intended for developers working on the project - the Flagstone web site is still the main site for discussion forums, downloads and other information about the project.

07-Mar-2006. Transform SWF 2.1 is now available for download. The most significant addition is lazy decoding of actions and shapes. This was tried as an experiment but the performance gains were so enormous that the change was brought forward - one of the larger files used in testing was decoded 420 times faster - obviously performance will vary but from all of the files used in testing the average performance gain was still a respectable 15 times. release notes.

25-Feb-2006. Describe SWF 3.1.1 now available. This release fixes a bug that was sufficiently annoying to merit pushing out a new release this quickly - the ratio field in PlaceObject2 was being decoded as a 22-byte field and not a 2-byte field. There were also a number of significant optimisations to reduce the amount of memory required and the size of exported files. The most important chage is that the OutOfMemory bug is now officially fixed. Only really large Flash files will cause the application to run out of memory however now there is code in place to allow a graceful recovery rather than a crash.

20-Feb-2006. Transform SWF 2.0.5 for Java is now available for download. This release adds a new tools package. The first tool is, TextDump a stand-alone program to generate, full, formatted descriptions of all the data structures and fields decoded in a Flash file. Test classes and suites that use TestNG are now added to the project. release notes.

17-Feb-2006. Describe SWF 3.1 (final candidate) is now available for download. Changes since Release Candidate 1 include: updated documentation; improved status information and improved the stylesheet used to display descriptions of the data structures. The application is now released under the GNU General Public License.

10-Feb-2006. Describe SWF Version 3.1 is now available on the Java downloads page. This release adds two new views: 1) Hex View (ala hexdump) which shows the bytes in a Flash file - a lot easier than working with the binary view and 2) a full description of the fields in each data structure. The application is now packaged with the IzPack installer.

19-Jan-2006. The forum software has been updated to allow file attchments when you post. When reporting bugs or asking for help it makes life easier if you include the section of source code that is causing the problem (preferably one that can be compiled and used to verify the problem) and any Flash files generated by the code.

A source code patch has been released for Transform SWF for Java, Version 2.0.4. The patch (number 1) is available on the downloads for Java page. The patch contains updates to FSDefineJPEGImage2 and FSDefineJPEGImage3 which fixes a bug where the start of image marker was being ignored and so the image data was null - all the bytes were being decoded as the encoding table. A new class FSProperty was added to allow Flash 4 properties to be decoded correctly by the FSPush class.

08-Jan-2006. After a lifetime of inactivity on the codebase I finally found the time to fix the problem with using AWT font definitions in the FSTextConstructor class. release notes.

05-Oct-2006. Roadmap for Transform SWF is now avialable on the Planned Releases section of the What's New page.

04-Oct-2006. Transform SWF, Version 2.0.4 for Java is now available for download. This is a minor release fixing a bug and simplifying the package structure and build process. release notes.