Flash on the iPhone? Orly...? Ya. Rly.

Monday 05 October, 2009

Flash on the iPhone? Orly…? Ya. Rly.

Well… Actually not…

But: If you are a Flash developer and you know how to compile a SWF then as off today* you can build native iPhone applications using your current AS3 knowledge. Does that sound familiar to you? Well it should because Adobe did the exact same thing when they first announced Adobe AIR.

Adobe just showed a Flash CS5 preview featuring a ‘compile for iPhone’ demo. (Watch a similar demo here)

Exactly how does this work?
Flash CS5 will be able to compile your Flash AS3 project to a native iPhone application. That means you can use your current knowledge and use it to build applications you can release in the Apple App Store.
However, Apple isn’t as forthcoming as most of us would like so there’s still no Flash Player for the iPhone available.

I do wonder though…
Can I add ‘iPhone Development’ to my resumé now? Or will Flash CS5 only be able to target a limited number of the iPhone OS’ API’s?
Having seen how AIR had to evolve / is evolving on the desktop, I feel there won’t be full support for the iPhone platform right away… However it’s still appealing to me… I’m really excited about the upcoming beta. Can’t wait to get my hands on this and play with it!

Other intresting Adobe Max announcements?
Hmz… Well for starters, Adobe is releasing Flash Player 10.1 (beta) sometime soon which features a lot of new stuff (most of it focussed on mobile devices. Examples: Multitouch, accelerometer input, optimized performance, gesture detection, …) . AIR 2.0 now supports external USB devices (like a Flip cam) and native fileformat linkage (what’s the correct term for that? kthxbye). They also demoed a new feature in Photoshop… But it’s nothing exciting like the Flash Player and the Flash CS5-iPhone announcement