Adobe announced Flash code generator for iPhone and I am very confused. I do not care if it makes trivial port of Flash games – iPhone does not really lack games. While people call it half step in the right direction, it does nothing for me or any Flex developer. Kevin Lynch communicated the amount of frustration Adobe had with this integration, but I believe that keeping pressure on Apple and continue working on competitive platforms would be more productive.
However, it is announced and will be out in few month (still to be defined) and we need to start working with it ASAP – as people do need mobile computers. I went through few sessions that talk about challenges in development for mobile platform and I do understand that challenges of Mobile platform are too great to hope for simple port. So we will need to add this tool and start thinking/practicing using this model so we can help developers when the product is released.
Underlying technology is not disclosed , just shown add-hoc “Save As” target in Flash Pro CS5 to generate ARM/iPhone code. From the presentation, it looks like they built very limited player as bootstrap code for iPhone, connected ARM codegenerator to MIR/LLVM processor, applied that to generated SWF, linked to bootstrap and produce now native iPhone application. Till I load these applications in my iPhone and find time to look at it more carefully I would assume it is the process.
But here is the second problem – and that is more of personal issue. Are we ready to let Apple force us to compile HTML page and submit it to Apple store every time we decide to write something?
Today 9 out of 10 attendes of Adobe MAX carries iPhone – including me. The percentage of early adopters and trend setters is very high here. IMHO, right now Adobe holds the key to success to Palm/Blackberry/Google platforms.
Sincerely
Anatole Tartakovsky