Accueil - XFL, the best new feature in Diesel

Colin Moock announced on his blog that Richard Galvan, the Flash authoring product-manager, reveals him a new feature in Diesel, the codename for next version of the Flash authoring tool.

The revealed feature is that "the next version of the Flash IDE will be able to export *and* import a new source format called XFL". XFL is a FLA file but written in a ZIP compressed XML file. Even better, Adobe will open the XFL format to let anyone generate or use XFL files to generate SWF files.

I thought a lot of time that this could be great if FLA files could be saved as XML. I needed it hardly in the past while working on localization of multiples FLA files, with many static text in it. I now could think to a tool that could open the file, reference each text entry and generate a CSV file that could be sent to translators and reverse the process when the file is translated.

I can think to many applications like : a tool for generating game maps, better audio editing tool for Flash, easy resource swapping directly in the file without needing Flash IDE, a script to generate the XFL that reference every external resources needed by a Flex project to give a blank model to designers, like symbols that just need to be filled with graphics.

The best thing in this announcement is that XFL will be an open format. Richard Galvan did not give the exact license applied to it, but I hope it will be GNU or Mozilla license.

The only bad news could be that Flash IDE users can't directly save to XFL or open Flash IDE project directly from XFL files. I sadly understood that Flash IDE will only import and export XFL files, and will not use it as a main file format.