The release of Gnash 0.8.8 met with a generally favourable response. Here are a couple of more detailed reviews:

• http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/08/gnash-088-a-huge-improvement-o.html
• http://www.webupd8.org/2010/08/gnash-088-claims-to-support-all-youtube.html

The release of Gnash 0.8.8 brings various improvements to rendering, ActionScript execution, compatibility, and flexibility.

But the most significant change is more of a removal than an addition: Gnash no longer has any AVM2 code. AVM2, the ActionScript Virtual Machine introduced in the Flash player 9, is increasingly used in new Flash movies.

It was becoming clear that the original implementation (started in about 2006) of the newer ActionScript Virtual Machine was fundamentally flawed. So fundamentally that it was obstructing code for the old virtual machine without any benefit to Gnash at all.

There is now a wiki page dedicated to the FLA format. It will always contain the latest known information about the format: currently not much more than when I published the original data.

If you can contribute anything else, feel free to add to the page!

Now Gnash is part Adobe Flash's rich developer ecosystem ...

The page, "the Truth about Flash", claims:

Finally, the Flash Platform has a rich developer ecosystem of both open and proprietary tools and technologies, including developer IDEs and environments such as FDT, IntelliJ, and haXe; open source runtimes such as Gnash; and open source video servers such as Red5.
[2010-05-17]

Flash is neither free nor open. Despite Adobe's publicity efforts, its Open Screen project, and its attempt to document various parts of the Flash specifications, it is still closed and restricted.

Flash's lack of freedom is a combination of three things:

1. it needs a closed player
2. its sources are closed
3. it is served in binary format over the internet

Since SWF6 it has been possible to generate gradient fills dynamically using ActionScript. Version 0.8.7 of Gnash will have support for these gradients.

The attached screenshot shows them working in Gnash, or see the original code and SWF.

SWF8 added more options to gradient fills. Gnash 0.8.7 does not support these, but it would be possible to add some or all of that support. If you are interested in having this functionality, please contact me!

Haikuzone reports that Gnash runs quite nicely on the Haiku operating system, an open-source implementation of the defunct operating system BeOS.

Since there is no official Haiku release of the proprietary Adobe Flash player (and quite likely never will be), Gnash is the only way to see some web content for Haiku users.

Gnash apparently runs in Google's new(ish) web browser, so for flash-addicts who insist on using Chrome, see rootninja's blog for a howto!

Free and Open Source Software provides many alternative ways of manipulating and creating Flash movies.

With the tools offered by Free Software, you can create SWF files in any way you like, as automatically as you like.

On-the-fly generation, pixel-perfect translation from images or documents to SWF, detailed examination of performance are all possible:

• Compiling SWFs just from ActionScript 2 or ActionScript 3 is easy using ming or swftools.

On gershon's YouTube channel is an an interesting example of Gnash's flexibility (and what you can do with some sideways thinking):

Gnash is used with some lua bindings to render a flash movie inside a 3-D game. This makes it possible to use any SWF as an interactive UI that can be developed and tested outside the game - even in a web browser.