Develop iPhone Apps in Flash CS5

Theresa Stone

In today’s Adobe MAX keynote, Johnny Loiacono (senior vice president of Adobe’s Creative Solutions Business) revealed that you will be able to create iPhone applications within the next version of Adobe Flash Professional.
Although Loiacono didn’t commit to a ship date for CS5 (based on previous shipping cycles, I bet we’ll see it around April of 2010), he did promise a public beta of Flash Professional CS5 before the end of this year. Sign up for the public beta here.
Some developers have already been using the Flash Professional CS5 private beta to create iPhone applications that are now available on the App Store (Just Letters, Finger Paint, Red Hood, Chroma Circuit, FickleBlox, That Roach Game, Trading Stuff, and South Park Avatar Creator). You can learn more about those apps at www.adobe.com/go/iphone.
What You Shouldn’t Expect
This announcement does not mean that Flash will run on iPhones. Flash Player 10.1 (also due in 2010) will run on Google Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile. However, according to Adobe, “The Apple iPhone SDK license terms do not allow runtime interpreted code, so Adobe is not able to deliver Flash Player in Safari on the iPhone without support from Apple. Applications for the iPhone built with Adobe Flash Professional CS5 do not include any runtime interpreted code.” Instead, CS5 will compile Flash to run natively as standalone apps on iPhone.
What You Should Expect
For Flash developers, being able to export one file to multiple platforms should be a big plus. Before now, for the most part, app developers had to master Xcode to get on the iPhone.
Matthew Richmond, who’s partner and Executive Creative Director of the Chopping Block, notes, “Flash — for better or for worse — is a widely accepted, relatively friendly environment for making interactive things. Xcode is for good reason a much more powerful and complex place that most Flash developers just don’t have the stomach or patience for. Today we wake up and find out that Flash Professional CS5 will be able to compile native iPhone applications, what’s not to like about that?”
“Sure,” Richmond continues, “there is a lot of room for disaster, but there is even more room for creative folks to unleash cool ideas. It’s a smart move for Adobe, a huge win for Apple and — once the dust settles — hopefully a solid little toolkit for Flash designers and developers in the mobile space.”
Much, Much More Information
Although this announcement is only hours old, there’s already quite a bit of supporting information. Here’s a short list:
* Flash Professional CS5 beta headquarters
* Developer FAQ
* The Flash Mobile Blog
* Blog of Mike Chambers, Flash platform developer relations product manager at Adobe
* Adobe iPhone forum
* “Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash,” an article by Aditya Bansod, senior product manager in Adobe’s platform business unit