Flash-back to iP* dev
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Somewhat like a flashback; In Adobe’s development of the latest CS5 suite of products, they included an ‘iPhone Packager‘, allowing Flash to be used as a development tool for Apps to be distributed to Apple’s iOS products (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad). Just before the release, Apple adjust their Terms to disallow such third-party application development…creating quite a storm among developers and users.
On September 9th, Apple stepped-back a bit and is now allowing the use of such toolsets to develop Apps.
…we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code.
Several sites covered this announcement, including Adobe themselves.
This is great news for the developer community, at least those that like to use Flash as a ‘write once, run anywhere’ tool. Of course, Apple still reserves the right to reject any App Store submissions, so the onus is still on developers to create efficient and useful products.
And to settle the anti-Flash crowd, this does not mean ‘Flash is on the iPhone’. The publishing tool Adobe created compiles the Flash app to a native codebase, so there is Flash in there…but it’s not ‘the Flash Player’…so hopefully that settles the concern about battery life and CPU usage a bit. And Adobe’s committment to the player’s improvements will only help resolve those issues as well.
Here at ICS, this opens a large barrier to mobile development. With the previous restriction, multiple tool sets and application versioning would be a significant burden to efficient development. With our Flash expertise, we now have a solid opportunity to create custom content and tools in Flash and deliver those products to the desktop and most all mobile devices.
Let us know how we can help bring your vision to the full range of devices!