Filed under: Software, iPhone, App Store, SDK, iPod touch
Turn your Flash into iPhone apps with Flash Professional CS5
So there's still no Flash in Safari, but once Adobe hatches Flash Professional CS5 you'll be able to port your wacky Flash games or animations out to real, live iPhone/iPod touch apps. Yep, ActionScript 3 nerds rejoice: that tasty App Store pie will soon be yours, never minding the whole plug-in debate.This is truly quite awesome in one regard, as it lowers the barrier to entry for some app developers, and will ease the port of some cool online games that we've seen floating around the interwebs. Then again, if you've spent a little time at places like Newgrounds.com, you will quickly see the dark side to this announcement from Adobe. All those crummy Flash toys online just got one step closer to coming to life on the App Store (we're guessing most will sell for the low, low price of $.99). At this rate there will be more apps than iPhones!
Still, back when I taught animation and game design, we had a lot of fun playing around in Flash for the powerful prototyping capabilities, if nothing else. It would have been cool to test games on the iPhone so easily. The video on Adobe's site looks pretty cool, with them touting the "responsiveness" of apps. Yeah, unlike the slowpoke performance my kids suffer on our G4 Mac when playing Flash games, eh? I get it -- when Unity 3D for iPhone came out there were problems with performance (it has matured nicely now), and any tool that exports in this way (turning an .fla into an .ipa, essentially) is bound to suffer from performance. Does anyone else find it ironic that a plug-in that was designed to make multimedia on the web lighter has become one of the most bloated? I digress.
No word on what SDK features are supported yet, but you can sign up for the demo when the beta starts. Those SDK features could be a killer, of course. If you can't leverage some of the features on the iPhone (
Update: Well, lookee there, apparently some games in the store have been using this already. Did you know South Park Avatar Creator was made using Flash? Amazing.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jash Sayani said 3:50PM on 10-05-2009
Awesome! Time to learn AS....
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ODog said 3:53PM on 10-05-2009
I was in the keynote and had my fingers crossed for this
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correto said 5:10PM on 10-05-2009
Great! Making money on the iPhone apps is graduating from difficult to impossible. Like the App Store was not cluttered enough already...
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Erik said 5:11PM on 10-05-2009
Which Flash Runtime APIs are available when developing for the iPhone?
As a general rule, Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 2.0 APIs are available when developing content for the iPhone. However, there are a number of exceptions, including, but not limited to:
Embedded HTML content (via webkit in Adobe AIR).
RTMPE
Dynamically loading SWFs that contain ActionScript
PixelBender Filters
Microphone Access
Video Camera Access
In addition, APIs which do not apply to iPhone (such as accessing dock icons) are not available.
The following native device APIs and functionality are supported:
MultiTouch
Screen Orientation
Saving images to Photo Library
Accelerometer
Geo-location
Cut / Copy / Paste
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drunknbass said 6:34PM on 10-05-2009
im curious how it will support multi touch because afaik flash doesnt have support for multiple inputs on mouse.
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Ryan Ragona said 3:10AM on 10-06-2009
There was a really interesting session at MAX today that I got to attend regarding Flash on the iPhone that really gave out a lot more details, many of which Erik totally nailed. It's a bit too much to go into in a comment, but I wrote up a quick post on some of the pros and cons on my blog:
http://ragona.com/blog/flash-iphone-real-story/
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