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Flash Coming to the iPhone

January 11, 2010 9:24:03.458

Well, Flash is sort of coming to the iPhone. But, it's enough to start a small tidal wave. TechCrunch reports:

Adobe is going to bring its 2 million Flash developers to the iPhone, with or without Apple's blessing. As it announced in October, the next version of its Flash developer tools, Creative Suite 5 (currently in private beta), will include a "Packager for iPhone" apps which will automatically convert any Flash app into an iPhone app. So while Flash apps won't run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be converted into an iPhone app. (Microsoft is taking a similar approach with Silverlight). This is a bigger deal than many people appreciate.

For good or ill, Flash is the standard video format on the web. HTML5 may change that over time, but not soon. For the forseeable future, Flash is pretty much where it's at if you want to hit the majority of browser users. More importantly (and this is what Apple feared early on) - it'll "flood the zone" with potential iPhone developers:

Once Adobe publicly releases CS5, Flash apps and video still won't run on the iPhone. But those 2 million developers will be able to keep working with Adobe tools and simply turn them into iPhone apps automatically. In contrast, there are only an estimated 125,000 or so iPhone developers.

Heck, I have the Flash SDK on my Mac inside Eclipse. I have the Glare code that hooks that up to VisualWorks. That means that with a fair amount of ease, I could probably package up a "Smalltalk Daily" app for the iPhone that drove itself off a VW back end once this comes out.

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posted by James Robertson

Comments

Re: Flash Coming to the iPhone

[Steve Wart] January 12, 2010 18:06:26.842

All you need for a Smalltalk Daily app is an RSS reader. It's pretty easy to do in Objective-C too. Although some people find the keyword syntax confusing, I'm sure you'd find it almost as easy as ActionScript

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