Flashing the iPhone?
For whatever reason, Apple has not allowed an Adobe Flash plug-in on the iPhone. If you visit a website that has Flash content, tough beans. You’ll see a box with a big “no” icon. I must also assume that Apple has disallowed a Flash player iPhone application, as that would be a no-brainer for Adobe. Now Adobe has done something really interesting.
Flash has become a standard platform for many reasons, one of them being that it is accessible to designers. We don’t need a degree in computer science to build interactive applications using it. Adobe is leveraging that advantage by turning Flash Professional CS5 into a development environment for iPhone applications. You can build an application within Flash just as you currently do for the web and then export it as an iPhone app that can be submitted to Apple’s App Store. And this isn’t theoretical. At MAX 2009, they demonstrated several apps built in a prerelease version that are currently available for download on the App Store. A public beta is planned for later this year.
This is going to open up iPhone development to an even wider range of developers. I think it was a brilliant move on Adobe’s part. Flash could very well become the most popular platform for iPhone development.
Update: Okay, maybe it isn’t so interesting as I thought. You don’t have access to any of the native iPhone UI. That means you have to implement everything in Flash: swiping, pinching, momentum-scrolling, etc. Good luck trying to get the exact feel of native applications. Here’s more information about the limitations from Jeff Rock (and a tip of the hat to Daring Fireball for pointing it out).
