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Flash on the iPhone

March 31st, 2010

Application Development, Technology, Web Development

Ever since the first release of the iPhone, people have been eagerly wondering when Apple would provide a Flash plug-in. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought the iPhone would be the perfect platform for the interactive nature of Flash.

From this article a while back, it seemed it would never happen because of Apple’s licensing issues about third-party applications, which dismayed many Flash Developers.  It appeared the only way to develop iPhone Apps was to download the software development kit and learn Objective- C.

Much has changed since then…. In October 2009, Adobe announced the upcoming release of Adobe’s CS5, and there’s been a lot of buzz about its ability to enable Flash Developers to build iPhone apps by enabling CS5 to compile AS3 code into an .ipa native iPhone application format! (in layman’s terms, it will translate the code into one that is appropriate for the iPhone) A handful of them are already built and in the Apple App Store, and there’s a more recent article that demonstrates Flash on other Smart Phones.

Lee Brimelow, Adobe’s Platform Evangelist, has a nice video where he demonstrates using Flash CS5 to build a simple “Hello World” iPhone application using AS3, and then compiling and exporting it to an iPhone in a few quick steps. This video gives a preview of the API accessing the accelerometer in the iPhone.

Navaro Kim