As the dust was settling from recent Adobe / Apple skirmishes (relating to Flash and the iPhone/iPad devices), Steve Jobs issued a lengthy “blog post” about Flash on Apple’s site, and this seems to put another nail in the coffin of Adobe’s iPhone packager.
In case this is news to you, to review:
1. Apple’s Safari browser on the iPhone/iPad excludes the Flash plug-in. Apple makes valid arguments against having Flash run on it’s devices, as well as questionable ones. Occam’s Razor: Apple needs to gatekeep the apps/games to guarantee revenues through their app store.
2. In an end-run move, Adobe created a “packager” for the Flash IDE that would let Flash developers output an iPhone-native-bytecode version of Flash apps. This is not to be confused with running flash (or swf files) on the iPhone in the browser, or AIR apps, either. Adobe took a huge risk and produced a pretty astonishing piece of code translation software. I’ve tested it and it works pretty well, especially for simple “apps” or games.
I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to leverage TimeGlider’s code base (written in Actionscript/Flash) to create an iPad version of TimeGlider. I was on the home stretch of re-working code so that it could be tested with Adobe’s CS5 Packager. Within days of Adobe’s launch of the CS5 line (which includes the iP packager) Apple made it clear that Flash IDE-created iP apps would likely be kept out of Apple’s app store.
I’ve been looking closely at Javascript frameworks that can really achieve what we need for building a good timeline, and I’m even looking at the MIT Simile timeline widget as something that could be adapted and used in lieu of Flash. There isn’t an equivalent to Flash yet respecting key criteria for TimeGlider. Flash is especially good (albeit less so on the Mac) at animation and other high framerate features. The Javascript platforms are catching up: When JQuery or Sproutcore or Capuccino produce frame-oriented features and good visual IDEs that make development easier, Flash could be in trouble. Meanwhile, I’m sure Adobe is working on Dreamweaver to be the IDE for these platforms.
Just this morning, there’s news of Flash running “flawlessly” on a Google-Android tablet prototype. There’s every indication that the Android/Flash partnership will evolve nicely. My vote is for Adobe to transform as much of AS3 into a Javascript library and marry it to JQuery DOM selectors.