http://www.loopinsight.com/2009/10/05/adobe-flash-professional-cs5-to-support-making-iphone-apps/ http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/05/not_quite_flash_adobe_announces_iphone_native_app_porting.html
Honestly i don't think it's a matter of just pressing the "export as ipa" button and calling it a day, as a professional iphone developer that has experienced flash game total conversions to the iphone platform, the level of optimization necessary for stable framerates is quite intense, to say the least. With 24mb of built in graphics memory on the opengl side of things, system memory limits of around 40mb, and a 500mhz processor, a flash game on a regular pc that is choking on a pentium 3 will *not* be playable on the iphone without a serious overhaul into its specific sprite sheets & texture memory limitation framework. That being said, I look forward to experimenting with this new conversion technology that adobe is providing to see where exactly the conversion performance ceiling is. Chris.
Perhaps that optimization is happening behind the scenes, at the click of a button... What am I saying? Adobe has not yet managed to put together a decent Flash player for the Mac. This sound like vaporware to me.
Okay, I just tried Chroma Circuit (mentioned on the video), and it's not bad. The Flash/PC version has a number of additional features, however, including music, menu options, etc, so it's not push-button-out-comes an iPhone app process. Still, I'm impressed. I take back what I wrote above about vaporware; Flash-to-iPhone is already here.
They do talk about a native compiler and possibly opengl acceleration in theory some of the code could be very fast vs interpreted code running on a Mac/PC these days. Or is modern flash coded Jitted on Mac/PC?
There's no reason a flash interpreter wouldn't fly on an iphone... especially if it's written by Adobe. So basically yes... I think you just hit publish to ipa and it will wrap your flash app with the native interpreter and you've got Flash on your phone. One app at a time. Here's what this means, imo: 1. Hello new glut of good but mostly crappy flash apps. 2. Goodbye indie developers. I'd be surprised if this doesn't push out at least 30% of the current indie devs who were already struggling to compete. Why agonize for months over an xcode game when it gets even more buried by the wave of pro-flash developer fare on it's way.
