Frash, Flash on the iPhone

Well, this time it’s for real. It isn’t powered by Adobe or supported by Apple but the fact is: Flash is now running on the iPhone. I said ‘is running on’; I did not say ‘is running perfectly smooth’.
There’s still a lot of work but this first step is a very good one, and everybody should be excited about this!

I took the time to test a few of the experiments I made over the past years on my iPad. I am pretty surprised about how well everything is going. In the following video I’ll show some of the tests I did.

About the ‘Red5-Letter-demo’: For some reason I wasn’t able to drag and drop during the demo. However it does work from time to time (still buggy as explained in the video though).

After seeing this video, you’ll probably wonder why I didn’t just give ‘real Flash sites’ a run for their money. Well, I already did. I tried DerBauer.de and 2Advanced.com. I saw intro screens but that’s it (site died after I tried clicking stuff). For the sake of making this thing look good, I prefer not to show how bad it performs on ‘high-end production‘ sites I mean, it’s still an alpha version. Give him/them a chance of getting there before saying it’s performing poorly

How to install Flash on your iDevice?

1. Make sure your iDevice is jailbroken. If it’s not you won’t be able to install Frash on your device. If you want to jailbreak, the simplest way I know at this point is by visiting jailbreakme.com using your iDevice. (Works for most iOS’s and devices). Other ways of jailbreaking can be found on the internet. (I will not assist anybody, just saying…)
2. Open Cydia on your device, go to sources and add ‘http://repo.benm.at‘.
3. When Cydia’s done adding the new repo to its database, go to the ‘Search‘ tab and look for ‘Frash‘.
4. Install it!
5. Go to Safari and visit a site using Flash. You should see a ‘Click to Flash’-like space where the Flash object should be. (If you don’t, you might want to try rebooting your device. It worked for me straight away) Click it and enjoy!

How to distribute your Flash CS5 iPhone apps via Cydia

Ever since Apple announced that they won’t allow any Flash CS5 compiled iPhone apps into the App Store, creative Flash developers lost their one chance to deploy their existing knowledge to the iPhone.

However: since Adobe released Flash CS5 with the iPhone packager anyway, we can actually deploy iPhone apps created in Flash CS5. The only thing we can’t do is to submit these apps to the Apple App Store (in fact we can, but they will reject them anyway, so why bother?)

However: We can distribute our apps using Cydia! Okay, it’s not the same, but you’ve got to start somewhere!

Setting up a Cydia repository is actually pretty easy. There’s a great tutorial right here!

There’s a little problem though: Flash CS5 creates an .ipa file. In step 3 of that tutorial you’ll need to put your application in the Applications folder. That application is actually an .app file, not an .ipa file. (I’ve tried it using the .ipa file; it doesn’t work )
Getting the .app file is pretty easy:

1. Rename your .ipa file to .zip
2. Unzip the archive
3. Your .app file is in the extracted Payload folder

That’s it! You can now create your own Cydia repository and distribute your rejected iPhone apps to the (jailbroken) masses using Cydia.

Have fun!

Flash CS5 + iPhone + Red5 = Cool shit

A few days ago I ran into trouble using Flash CS5 to publish an iPhone application to an IPA file. I got some help from Peter and Erwin but it didn’t help in the end for an unexplicable reason…

However an hour ago I figured out what was wrong: About 4 months ago I had some problems with Java on my Mac, so I fiddled a bit with the settings… Turns out: Flash CS5 didn’t like that… After fixing that, I was back in business.

I got started right away, trying what I wanted to try for several weeks: testing if iPhone apps would be able to connect to a Red5 server… It works right out of the box. I’m in love with this!

Check it out!

Note: To be able to publish/run Flash Apps on your iPhone you need to an official iPhone Developer. If you have an iPhone but you have no Apple iPhone Developer subscribtion, you won’t be able to test this.

It makes you kinda wonder…

This whole Adobe vs. Apple debacle is starting to make me doubt if I want to stay a web developer at all. The companies, that provide me with tools I use and love, are acting like 8-year old kids, saying the other one is lying.

This (web dev) was supposed to be fun and at some point enable me to make a living… Not an endless amount of arrogant crap coming from a few guys who tend to forget people are actually watching them.

In the past 2 years I’ve growing more towards video and photography anyway… I might just start thinking about a career change if this keeps on going.

Section 3.3.1: Fuck off, devs

Well, if you haven’t heard about section 3.3.1 by now, you probably lived on another planet for the past 24 hours. Yesterday Apple gave a developer preview of what they’ve been working on for the next generation iPhone OS. It was a pretty great preview at first: They announced multitasking, folders, iAd, Game Center, etc. All pretty great stuff. Everything well executed as far as we could see.
As expected: Apple still says no to Flash, but nobody really expected something new on that subject.

After the keynote, developers were enabled to get their hands on the iPhone OS 4 SDK. That’s when they had to agree to the new PLA (programming license agreement) which stated the following at some point:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

If you’re not into reading legal stuff or long and very boring statements, let me translate and summarize it for you.

Hey you non-Objective-C writing prick: Fuck off. Go play somewhere else.

What Apple did here is not to make sure the apps on the app store are of a good quality. They literally told every creative Flash/Unity3D/etc developer to either learn Objective-C or to sod off and create apps for Android.

I don’t really know why Apple is doing this, other than to piss off Adobe (in particular) and make sure every developer thinks twice before even considering building apps for the iPhone platform.

Some people on Twitter suggested for Adobe to postpone the Adobe CS5 Mac release.
I’m sorry: What? Read the rest of this entry »