On Monday Adobe announced that Flash CS5 Professional will allow developers to write applications and compile code to run on the iPhone and iPod touch.
John Loiacono, head of Adobe’s Creative Solutions business unit:
We are ecstatic to announce that we’re enabling you to use your Flash development tools to build applications and compile them to run natively on the iPhone.
Adobe and Apple have had a relatively public battle over Flash on the iPhone, and for developers, this might be the next best thing to running Flash in the browser. This announcement was made at Adobe’s Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles where Adobe also announced that Flash was coming to Windows Mobile, Palm webOS, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry. The only major smartphone platform missing from the list is the iPhone. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, I don’t expect Flash to come to MobileSafari anytime soon.
If you are interested in the technical details Louis Gerbarg has poked around an IPA file produced using Flash CS5, while Adobe’s Aditya Bansod talks about how the compiler works.
There are already CS5-built apps available in the App Store, including:
A public beta of Flash CS5 will be available later this year with the final shipping version coming sometime next year.
Although Adobe will have a heck of a time supporting this (Apple’s not one to worry about competing development environments), I personally don’t have any problem with people building apps for the iPhone using CS5. As long as those applications work well, I’ll use them. I’m not too fond of the idea that there will be developers without access to UIKit but I can get over that, as long as the apps don’t look too weird.
