What You Build For A Flash Enabled iPhone?
Everyone knows the story behind this already, Apple has to date not allowed Flash content to be displayed on the iPhone. Only Steve Jobs knows when that might happen, if ever. But let’s try and dream a little…
Let’s imagine that Apple announces Flash content will be viewable on the iPhone in March. What would you build for a Flash enabled iPhone?
I’m sure a lot of you have read the success stories of some of the more popular apps on the iPhone {how many here have the iFart app?} and felt that you could have pulled that off in a Flash app. The thing with the iPhone is that there’s a whole new beast to tame and that is the Accelerometer. The physical act of movement for applications on a desk and laptop computer is basically non-existent as everything is pretty much mouse dependent. It would be interesting to know how Flash would interact with the accelerometer?
Here is an article on BoingBoing about the accelerometer and how developers have some hurdles with developing apps for the iPhone.
What would you build?
The first couple of things that come to my mind are obviously having to do with videos because…what else would you do with an iPhone? Well, of course you could also build games and such, but once again as I am not aware of the intricacies involved with the accelerometer and how it will interact with Flash I’ll leave it up to you AS experts to figure out.
Then we have the novelty type items, this is where things could get really fun. But I’ll leave it for you all to start the discussion around it.
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Hmmm! There IS one thing I can think of that I would find quite useful. But I would be a fool to tell.
SP – The blog post title is all wonky. It should be “What would you build for a Flash enabled phone?”
They most likely won’t release flash for iPhone for quite some time because that means free games available and their app store would go down the drain.
I would build a good weather report application. The one that’s available by default really sucks!
Interesting question. But even if flash ever got released forthe iphone, what would you build on it that you couldnt do a whole lot better using the native sdk. Not much I think. Its probably one of the reasons it’ll never get released, that and the fact Apple would lose its a heap of its AppStore revenue.
hypothetically speaking though, if they did release a version for the iphone. How do you think it would work. Would you launch the flash player as an app and then launch swfs from that. I’m not sure but ‘t that sounds like little complicated to me? Who knows, but even if they don’t allow a standalone player at least they should support it as part of the browser. They cant really call it a full browsing experience without it.
There’s no reason to develop Flash to iPhone. What are the advantages? I mean, iPhone has video, a powerful SDK, awesome new JavaScript features and things like CSS animation (hardware accelerated). Where Flash comes in? Video? Seriously, the only reason Flash Player is the leader of delivering video content on the web, is only because his penetration. Inside a cellphone, there’s no penetration. The APIs available on ActionScript to handle video are really bad. Games? You can use thousands and thousands of libraries available for game development on iPhone (like Box2D) and also take advantage of OpenGL and hardware accelerated features.
I work with Flash everyday, but sometimes it’s stupid to think that Flash is good anywhere.
Gabriel, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve often thought of applications I’d like to develop on the iphone but I’d never do them with Flash even if it was available.
As you say, when you have access to openGL why on earth would you use Flash. I am also a Flash developer but I’m coming round to think that as peoples daily experience with computing expands to more and more different devices, then what role does flash have to play in these emerging areas. Will Adobe try to shoehorn a new hacked version of Flash player for each new device?
Gabriel I agree with your sentiments that Flash is definitely not the be all answer for the web.
There is one thing I can think of that flash would be good for “live t.v”