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Google has launched a new tool called Swiffy, a Flash conversion tool for Flash animations to move to HTML5.  This has long been the largest negative for many users when adopting an iPad or iPhone – they will not play Flash video, which includes much of YouTube.

It’s likely for that reason – YouTube – that Google went ahead with this step.  The company is very fond of HTML5 and has been a big proponent of its standard, pushing the Chrome browser into compliance in beta testing.  With tablets like the iPad and with the iPhone being the most-adopted smart phone in the U.S., it makes sense for Google to come up with a converter – despite Google’s Android operating system competing with the iOS.

The new tool, Swiffy, is a summer project that an engineering intern took on at Google.  So far, Swiffy can convert most .swf files to HTML5 (via a JSON file) and it works on most animations.  It does not convert Flash-based games and currently does not convert streaming video, but it will do vector graphics, embedded fonts, and timeline animations.

Future plans obviously include Flash-based streaming video and games.  Google is promoting Swiffy only as an experiment right now, but the tool is definitely powerful for a first-time release from an intern.  It is, of course, being built completely on an open standard.

Want to see those killer 1970’s Budweiser commercials from when beer was beer and men had hairy chests? How about those big hair ’80s MTV music videos we all used to pretend to be morose to back in the day?

There’s now an app for that.

This may be one of the coolest apps to hit the iPhone and iPad in a long time. The Video Time Machine is an entertainment revolution happening in your hand.  It’s an app that lets you pick a year (any year) and then watch videos from that year in a sort of flashback retro video feed.

The app has access to over 10,000 curated videos from many eras, including classic silents from the early 1900’s through to Elvis and all the way towards today.  It’s integrated with Twitter, so when you find your favorite A-Team episode available on the app, you can share it with your friends.  Their enthusiastic response, of course, is not guaranteed.

You can sort results by category as well as year, so if you want to see all of the videos they have that feature the BeeGees, look under Music and you might find them.

The Video Time Machine was developed by Original Victories, Inc. and is available in the iTunes store.  Below is a commercial for the app: