I thought of a much more accurate analogy. Have you ever disassembled a radio or automobile engine to learn how it works, so you could be more competant when working with your own electronics or motors, even learn a few tricks of the trade? How is viewing the swf files of others any different? This is more accurate than the building analogy. I honestly want to know so that I have a reason not to do it.
Looking forward to hearing your ideas.
David
I seriously doubt that decompiling and viewing code is an efficient way of learning. If it was, then design colleges/online courses/flash books would all base their content on this method of gaining knowledge … yeah right.
Without any explanation of the developers thought process and reasoning behind what they’ve done, the knowledge on display in a decompiled swf is worth very little. Unless you already have a fair bit of expertise to understand it all. Sure you can open up a radio and see all the capacitors & resistors, but without a solid background of electronic principals you’re not going to do much but tinker. And I’d file swf decompiling under exactly that - fine for mucking about but it’s never going to replace proper learning.
With hundreds if not thousands of tutorials online covering pretty much every aspect of flash design, and plenty great books available, the flash community is well served with great assets for learning, why bother fiddling with others swfs?
IMHO, the prevalence of decompilers is just an illustration of today’s lazy fast-food mentality towards acquiring skills. We want it all, now. You can see similar in the music world where everybody with a handful of old records and a sampler thinks they are a skilled musician.
An inefficient learning style to some may be a worthwhile exercise to others. Your response discriminates against a great number of people who possess the kind of mindset that benefits from tinkering with difficult mechanisms that have been built by others. I run into these kinds of people from time to time. They are often the type who like to build things from scratch at low levels using an assembler or build robots from scrap parts (as a hobby). Tinkering is how these people learn best, because that is the level of complexity that they enjoy. That isn’t to say that they wouldn’t use a high-level language like flash/actionscript, because high-level means high productivity for them as well.
Sometimes you come across clever things that are hard to find in the common online tutorials available to everyone. Instead of spending days looking for the tutorial for such a thing, it’s right there in front of you to study (granted, it may be more difficult). Copying and pasting it would be stealing, but learning something new from it is not stealing as per the examples from the non-computer world that I gave in previous posts.
Lazy fast-food mentality? I thought your original point was that tinkering with decompiled code is too difficult to be efficient for learning. You can’t have it both ways. 
Let’s assume you are right about everything you said, bringing into question the effectiveness or relevance of using viewers to learn actionscript. Your response still doesn’t say anything about the morality or ethics of viewing the actionscript to learn from it, as opposed to stealing it. But I do appreciate your contribution to my personal deliberations about this.
David
Pixel artists zoom in on the pixel art of others, not to copy and steal their work, but to study and learn from it so that they can apply the same talent and methods to their own pixel art. This is accepted practice in the pixel art community.
Yet another example.
David
similarly to the users before me, i apologise for the resurrection of an old topic but the analogys have been thus far misinterpreted…
the building site for example, fair enough you can learn techniques from waching and copying, but it is against the law to duplicate the original designs AND PRESENT IT AS YOUR OWN…
personally, i find the radio a better example – yes, its okay to look inside, tinker and figure out how it all works, but it is very likely that the design for that individual radio will either be patented or copyrighted for example …
similarly, there is nothing to stop you opening up a car engine to see how it works… BUT if you copy the design of the engine or the design of the car, then you can be prosecuted …
is there anybody else here who advocates the copying of a car or engine for example, and then reproducing it as your own?
that’s fundamentally what is being argued – and to put a real-life example into it, im sure that Ferrari wouldnt be too pleased if Honda started stealing their designs …
regards,
Kwah =]
Yes and we should remove the “view source” button from every browser!!!
/sarcasm
Come on you guys… settle down.
Wow how did this thread get so out of hand!..posts 6 and 7 totally OTT!..i’ve ended up here after having actually lost a .fla of a mp3 player i made about a year back and can’t remember how to code a certain feature in it ( im not an actionscripter by trade)…flash scanner will do the trick nicely!
I feel that looking at other’s swfs is not unethical…I feel that if you look at someones work to see how it was created…and how some of the functionality came about…then you are not doing anything wrong. I would agree that copying and pasting would be wrong. Online tuturials are great, but their practical application is not as clear in the tut as it is in a full grown flash app/site…not to mention finished flash apps/sites usually combine many different tutorials to create one masterpiece…there aren’t that many tutorials that build on previous tuts to show how you would progress through flash to create something bigger in the end…I had to use Sothink SWF decompiler because we bought out a company who provided us with a flash app…when I was hired, I knew nothing about flash, and I was told to recreate the software…to begin, I had to figure out what the hell the previous crap did, and how it did it…so i decompiled the swf and I found a host of great information…and my current replacement has 0% code from the previous application…I was able to learn the structure and the functionality of the code from the decompiled app and many many months of tutorial/forum help…
this post can go on back and forth endlessly because there are definitely ways of using decompilers in an unethical or even illegal way…but there are also many ethical and even beneficial applications of such software…its all circumstantial…and i dont think any of us can tell anyone they are using the software one way or the other unless we know exactly what they are doing…
so to say that anyone who uses a decompiler is a scumbag, i think is very wrong…
I was searching for information about SWF and FLA after using a flash app a friend of mine had made.
Its a simple timer for a boardgame called space hulk. Sounds are activated as the timer winds down in certain increments. I guess by many peoples standards here, it would be childsplay to create.
I have always been intrigued on how to make flash, and after he made this app, I thought I would see if I could tweak it to make it better. (have actions happen while a loop is occuring for example). Boy was I in for a shocker to find out exactly how hard it is for the layman to try and figure out these nuts and bolts.
Trying to open his swf in MX did nothing except play the file. I couldnt understand how the hell to alter it. Then someone told me I need this magical thing called a decompiler.
Ok. So I download a decompiler. easy.
Except, it didnt really mean anything to me still. I could see what compromised the swf. but it didnt really allow me to alter the deeper code. The timing of the audio loo, altering the pitch, etc.
In short, I have a new found respect for coders. As a layman, I thought I was doing pretty good using HTML…lol but I really do beleive that decompilers from my limited three hour experience with them are far more reviled than they should be.
I guess if you are quite prficient in writing flash code, then I suppose it has the potential for abuse, like many things.
But for me, it was amazing lurking through all the nuts and bolts trying to figure out how something function. In some ways, I got a better understanding. In others, it caused more questions than it answered.
And at the end of it all, I still cant customize that damned flash app to my own specs due to my inability to understand through lack of experience. Not that I want to claim it as my own, but to fiddle with it to add different sounds and whatnot. Like a monkey trying to get a crystal radio set to work.
Sorry for the resurrection. But since I have seen that this thread had been resurrected several times, that I would not be the only one crucified for threadnomancy. I just wanted to share an extreme noobs impression about decompilers.
its too bad this post is ranked 1 in google for best swf decompiler, its been utterly useless, all you guys are doing is knocking the poor guy, i’m a long time member but i havent been active in over a couple years but seeing this post disturbed me, not because of his question, but because we’re afraid to exchange information on a topic that can have many uses aside from your assumed “black hat” tactics, im here i just want to say that its too bad that you cant provide the poor guy with the information he’s asking for…
so i’ll go ahead and say that so think is good but there are some swfs you can’t convert to fla. i don’t advocate using software to snatch other peoples work and pass it on as your own but it is always useful looking at what other people have done with their designs when your new.
I would like to know some better softwares so if you guys know any post em, by better, i mean one that can open all swfs, so think cant open some - im sure there a “best” one as the OP is asking
Calm down!
I bet you more than anything that this person wan’t to decompile a swf just so he can say he can. Or show his friends how he gave himself 900 lives in some game. Either way, its harmless and a learning experience that gives knowledge of how things run down at low levels. This brings me to my next point.
Something is not always right or wrong just because it is legal or illegal respectively. It is not illegal for me to take apart my computer, or any other device for that matter, and it is most certainly not wrong. Its common. When a big company comes out with something new, rival compaines buy of some of those devices and dissect them to see how they did it. Same goes for software. If it is not wrong for me to take apart my compter, it is not wrong for me to take apart someones software. As long as I don’t redistribute it, or do anything that hurts the developer with it (for instance, distributing or “opening up” the source) there is nothing I am doing wrong. Whether it is illegal or not, it is still not “wrong” to decompile software if your intentions are good.
Seeing as this topic contains content that can be used with perfectly good intent, it should not be removed, as it would be a violation of freedom. I commend the mods for that.
All this being said, do punish the people who want to learn, punish the people who are actually doing the wrong things, like redistributing source and infringing on other people’s copyrights/patents/etc. Because as long as the world exists there will always be those of us that call themselves hackers, the ones who want to take apart, try new things, learn everything there is to know about something from the bottom up, attempt to use things for purposes never thought or for purposes that things were never meant to be used. We push the limit, and we do it “because we can.”
To these touching examples of free speech, we might add:
http//opensource.software.informer.com/download-opensource-swf-decompiler/
i think i’ve tried all decompilers on the net and choose Flash Decompiler Trillix (most of all cause it works with flash cs4 better then others). now i’m thinking about purchasing it, but may be someone can advise better one.
Shame on him if he is trying to decompile and pass off someone else’s work as his own, but, the completely legitimate reason that brings me here asking the same question is:
The client I’m currently working for has some flash on the webpage and the original creators have gone out of business. That leaves me no option (other than recreating it from scratch). Imagine trying to guess the site where they pulled the stock photography from.
Also, if you’re working for a client and they paid you for your work, it’s no longer your work to protect. It’s called “work for hire.” Once they pay you, it’s theirs. Unless your work agreement specifically states that you retain all rights to every single bit of the media, it’s the client’s.