Having used .swfs in my professional web pages for many years now, I feel kind of dumb asking:
Is there any way to play a .swf movie just by double-clicking it?
That is, can I view one without it being embedded in an HTML page (or without running the actual Macromedia Flash authoring software … my business partner is the Flash guy, so he has MX on his computer … I haven’t had the actual Flash app on my machine since Flash 4 was the latest thing)?
I set the .swf default to play with Firefox. I have the flash player plugin for FireFox installed. Firefox opens and plays the flash animation drictly from my hard drive. You could also right click and select run with FireFox if you don’t wish to set FireFox as the default application for .swf.