While Gruber, as one would expect, makes convincing arguments and some good points in both his recent posts regarding gearlive’s flash-on-the-iphone rumour, I can’t help the feeling that he’s missing something:

The iPhone SDK is not going to be the sort of environment like Mac OS X where developers are free to create system-level plugins. No one is going to get to diddle with MobileSafari without Apple’s approval.  

You’d get no argument from me there, but maybe there’s another way. What if – and it is an if – Adobe were to write a legit iPhone app that functioned as a new AIR platform, so us legions of hungry flash designer/developers could create bespoke apps to run in it? That’d be pretty cool and a lot more likely than Apple allowing Adobe to show video etc in webpages. Plus they’ve had a long, long time to figure it out, so you never know.

Slicker still would be if Adobe, instead of creating a platform app for AIR stuff to run in, made it possible to output from AIR directly as a native iPhone app, test in Device Central and deploy via iTunes just like we think traditional Apple devs will. Top all that off with well-written custom AS3 libraries (asking a lot from Adobe I know) for the various types of multi-touch interaction we’re all now so used to on the iPhone and you’d have a kick-ass, user-transparent dev platform based on flash. In fact, stretching this a little further, I can imagine testing these apps out directly in Device Central on a forthcoming MacBook Pro using its new multi-touch trackpad to get everything just so.

Now I’m not saying this is all that likely – something on that scale would more than likely require a big dollop of help from Adobe – but I’m crossing every finger I’ve got. I can dream, right?

February 13th, 2008 by Addy P.
It's all about the flash, iphone | 1 Comment »