The Gadgets

Steve Jobs did a job with iPhone that has made everybody crazy. Every developer has an urge to develop an app for iPhone. The rivals are also going mad to beat iPhone down.

Realizing the iPhone’s popularity and developer interest, Adobe has come up with the most interesting and unexpected thing of the year. I couldn’t believe at first but the official Adobe statements made me believe that iPhone apps can now be developed with Adobe Flash. If you suspect that it would be some layer like Adobe Air whose apps can run on Mac as well as Windows, then you are wrong. The jaw dropping fact is that Adobe Flash CS5 has the capability to export the source code in the native iPhone format. Adobe flash CS5 is still in private beta but there are a few apps available on the iTunes store that are developed with Adobe Flash CS5. Some of them are:

• Just Letters
• Chroma Circuit
• Fickleblox
• Red Hood
• Trading Stuff

Apps developed with Flash CS5 are eligible to be approved for the iTunes store and are officially said to be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 or higher. I don’t know why are some of the above apps can run on iPhone OS 2.2.1 as well.

Most of the native functionality is supported. The apps can also take advantage of iPhone hardware acceleration. Here’s a list of supported functionality:

• MultiTouch
• Screen Orientation
• Saving images to Photo Library
• Accelerometer
• Geo-location
• Cut / Copy / Paste

If you are a developer, you’d know that there’s an iPhone simulator included with the iPhone SDK which runs iPhone apps on a mac but the apps developed with Adobe Flash CS5 won’t be able to run on iPhone simulator.

Flash developers can export their existing flash apps as iPhone compatible format povided they are developed with Actionscript 3.0. Point to be noted is that Flash for iPhone has not come yet and your iPhone’s Safari browser can’t still play swf files. Aobe says they are on it.