Monday, October 05, 2009

Flash Apps to Come to the iPhone, But Not to Safari [IPhone]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/o4JdpfYDL4o/flash-apps-to-come-to-the-iphone-but-not-to-safari

After today's bad news, Adobe Senior Product Manager for Developer Relations Mike Chambers has announced a way to put Flash into the iPhone: Compile Flash into full standalone applications for the App Store. This solves part of the iPhone-Flash conundrum.

Using the next version of Flash Authoring—which is now in private beta—developers will be able to turn any Flash app or widget into an iPhone/iPod touch application. Some apps will require optimization, taking into account the iPhone's hardware limitations and its multi-touch user interface conventions:

The iPhone has a significantly slower processor and less memory than what can be found in a typical desktop computer. As such, existing content may need to be optimized for performance, and / or user interactions (given the smaller screen and different UI metaphors).

However, publishers will be able to easily adjust their existing code at a small cost, developing a full app that would be available at the App Store. While this doesn't fix the lack of Flash in Safari—which Chambers says they are still working on—it's a huge advance. Just imagine Web publishers creating iPhone-capable versions of their sites—or part of them—which would feed on the same online data as their browser-based counterparts.

Now, if Adobe introduced a Flash video player, and Apple enabled Safari to recognize Flash video like they do now with YouTube H.234 material, everything would be fine. [Flash apps for iPhone and Mike Chambers]