06 Oct 2009

Publishing To The iPhone With Flash CS5

Yesterday’s big announcement from Adobe was that the next version of Flash will be able to create iPhone/iPod touch apps. As with Unity, they’ve sensibly opted to compile to native code to get around Apple’s ban on interpreted code (which they seem to relax for retro game emulators).

It’s good news for Flash developers, and may well allow me to easily offer modified iPhone versions of online games to clients, but some people are already getting carried away. There’ll be CPU and memory limitations to deal with, restricted/unsupported features, and almost certainly a few bugs and glitches. I suspect it’ll prove viable for 2D games but rather bloated and inconsistent (vs. the look and feel of true native apps) for other applications; sorry, Flex developers, you might want to fish that Objective-C book out of the bin…

Tuesday, 6th October 2009, 10:29am GMT

Filed under: Client-side Coding, Games and Multimedia, Mobile and Wireless, News and Current Affairs, Software

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Comments

Don't be so quick to tell Flex guys to pick up Obj-C -- besides, I already threw those books away. ;)
Flex will be able to do the same thing. Of course, the Flex Framework is a bit "heavy".
That's where Slider comes in.

— thebouv, 13th Oct, 3:27pm

I was going to post a link above to a page about Slider, the Flex mobile framework. But my comment is rejected with a URL in it.
Let's see if it'll let me link it to my name this time.

— thebouv, 13th Oct, 3:28pm

Sorry about that, my anti-spam measures were a bit stricter than intended!
It's not that people won't be able to produce decent apps with Flex, more that the extra software layers and lack of native controls will be a hindrance vs. something put together in Xcode.

— Matt Round, 13th Oct, 3:50pm

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Publishing To The iPhone With Flash CS5

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