Flash CS5 Will Export iPhone Apps 154
HanClinto was among a number of readers to send word that Adobe has worked around the inability to run Flash on iPhones and iPod Touch devices. Adobe has been trying to work with Apple for more than a year to get its Flash Player software running on Apple's products, but has said it needs more cooperation from Apple to get it done. Now Adobe has come up with a work-around. At its Adobe Max developer conference in Los Angeles Monday, Adobe announced that the CS5 release of Flash Professional, due in beta later this year, will allow developers to write applications and compile the code to run on Apple devices. Getting these into the app store might be tricky, though.
Hard vs. easy (Score:1, Insightful)
>>Getting these into the app store might be tricky, though.
But getting this into the courts will be a snap.
Certain recent high-profile apps store refusals (most notably, google voice) have drawn FCC attention. Apple cannot keep a walled garden forever.
Re:Whats the issue Apple have with Flash? (Score:2, Insightful)
Paranoia is an irrational fear.
Apple strongly controlling apps is a business decision.
There's a difference.
It's one of many business decisions that makes up the iPhone ecosystem. Something which has been phenomenally successful. Consumers like the end result, and vote with their dollars.
Whilst Apple employees do make mistakes with edge cases of their rules, the rules themselves are not irrational. And Flash isn't an edge case.
Do you still have to... (Score:2, Insightful)
...sign that horrid SDK license?
Do you still have to buy a hideously overpriced Apple machine to use as a dev box?
Flash (REAL, unchained and fettered, Flash) and Java do not exist on the iPhone for one simple reason: GREED.
If a complete Flash Player and Java are on the iPhone, everyone can develop for the iPhone without an SDK, everyone can publish/sell applications without the crApp Store.
I have no problem with a company making money off its products, but the lengths to which Apple disciples will go to justify the hideousness of its corporate behavior is only matched by their ability to ignore Apple's ridiculous prices.
Re:Yet another language (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank god only AS3 is supported.
Although, most of what our company outputs is AS2, mainly because our primary clients have paranoid and backwards IT techs who refuse to update their flash players, or low-budget IT Depts who are still using Pentium IIIs.
Anything that'll give us some leverage to put AS3 into practice is well worth it
"Sure, you can have it on the iPhone, but only if you update your flash player on your PCs"
Re:Yet another language (Score:1, Insightful)
Right, because the programming language is synonymous with the quality of the program. "You wrote a program in a language I don't know or understand. It MUST be crap". It's like Fox News for technology here. Besides, you are worried about "crapware"? Yes, let's continue the trend of creating farting apps and bouncing boob games and hope that "crapware" doesn't come out. It's all quality now!
Re:Do you still have to... (Score:3, Insightful)
Having worked on Microsoft stuff, I'm wondering why I have to buy a hideously expensive OS, Visual Studio
Nice try, but Visual Studio is available for free (see the Express editions). Plus you don't need to use those, there are other compilers/IDEs available. And you can run on hardware from any manufacturer. And you don't need permission from MS to release your application on their platform.
But apart from all of that, yes, I'm afraid you do need to pay for Windows.
Don't like the hardware prices, don't buy.
Sure, we don't. But all the while there are daily Iphone stories (two today, in fact), it's fair game for people to comment on them. If people don't know about these issues, how will they know not to buy?
My iPhone programming experience is an order of magnitude better than my WinCE and Win Mobile development experience.
Order of magnitude, eh? How do you quantify "experience"?
Compare the real price to get in the door and I think the Apple story is much better.
What's the "real" price, and how does it differ to price?
Re:Palm Pre (Score:3, Insightful)
I love how things not being supported is twisted to be a good thing - we've seen it before: 3G, MMS, video, copy/paste. That last one in particular, it's amazing the lengths people went to to justify how the UI was improved by not being able to do something as simple as copy/paste, by talking about "new paradigms" (but not ever explaining what those were).
The joke is that when the Iphone finally does add those new features, suddenly the argument that it was better off without them vanishes, and the news is accompanied with much hype and fanfare, as if it was the first phone to ever have such a feature.
I wish I thought of these tactics 10-15 years ago for the Amiga, when development for it was disappearing after Commodore's demise. "Why yes, it doesn't matter that AmigaOS doesn't have Java, in fact, that's a reason why it's better than Windows, because Java is horrible!"
Re:Palm Pre (Score:2, Insightful)
It would be amazing if it was true. But it's not.
What people did say was that all the various suggestions that people here and on blogs were making for how to do the UI were shit. And that Apple would probably do cut'n'paste in a future version when they came up with a good UI for it. Which is exactly what happened.
Re:Whats the issue Apple have with Flash? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, I know. Until just last week I ran Ubuntu on a 2.8ghz machine, and believe me, I know how painful it is to hear your CPU fan spin up to max as you're watching a TV show that if you had pirated would take almost no system resources to run.
Not seeing the wood for the trees. (Score:2, Insightful)
Adobe have basically announced a way to compile Flash to native iPhone apps. This should mean that all their future product releases that author Flash should hopefully have similar functionality. (I'm being selfish and thinking Flex here.)
The next logical step is for Adobe to allow you to deploy natively to other Phone OS. So as a Flex(read Flash, well AS3 ) developer I should be able to write an application, and then deploy to Air, browser, iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Do you realise the impact on development time? Bug fixing each target environment suddenly becomes a non-issue. Time to market is massively shortened. This is huge.
I don't know if Adobe realise the potential for this. I know they were trying to get around Apple's intransigence, but I think they may have something exceptionally useful here.
Re:Palm Pre (Score:3, Insightful)
your having problems with logic here but its quite simple, let me help you a bit.
for most people flash is a very good thing, for idiot zealots like you it isn't. flash continues to spread and grow in power.
the increasingly shrill voices of those like you
if you're stupid enough to buy a phone that drops 1/5 of all calls in nyc then they deserve what they get - a walled garden that nobody with half a brain would want to be in.
you just wait for html 5 with svg wundershow extensions /sarcasm.
Well I byte, young man.
Embedded devices have not the same resources available as desktop PCs have. CPU intensive tasks are often offloaded from the CPU to specialized hardware. Video and Audio en-/decoding is a good example for that.
Running a video player as separate application (which is by no means efficent) in another application just isn't going to help the cause (especially, if the same software performs already pretty bad on Desktop hardware).
NAtive video players can take advantage of the environment by default (be it hardware acceleration or desktop integration).
Apple might have an agenda, but if not I see plenty of technical reasons to rather not have flash on the iPhone (doesn't flash videos use h.264 for encoding which is certainly already supoorted on all apple platforms?).
I am still trying to figure out where my logic is flawed, you might be able to help me politely?
-S