Geek Answers Handbook

How promising is Flex / Flash as a development path for the iPhone / iPad?

[2015 update: I think it's safe to say that Flash is dying fast. Do not go there. I have to say, though for a short moment to shine, Flex was a really great datavis technique.]

I am interested in developing for iPad and iPhone, but I would prefer not to study the whole Apple stack (and a good golly, I do not want to return to manual memory management). Oh, of course, I could find out, but at the moment I don’t have that level of commitment to the environment. I already have professional experience with Flex, so I am intrigued by Adobe move to make Flash / Flex compilation on iPhone and iPad. My question is: how promising is the Adobe Slider development path? Most likely, we will see that Slider is publicly available in a reasonable amount of time (Adobe: "It is expected that the early Flex mobile branch will be available in 2010")? Perhaps we will see reasonable performance? Are there obstacles to development that have not yet become clear? Gosh, is this all just a steamer? There is still fairly limited information, as far as I have seen, but I'm interested in people's predictions, even if they are speculative.

+6
flex flash iphone slider
source share
6 answers

Adobe cross-compilation technology is not vapor-containing (for Flash, in any case, have not seen so many repetitions: Flex). And it is unlikely that they would have invested so much money in this if they thought that on the very first day he would be torpedoed. Nevertheless, you should draw your own conclusions about your long-term dependence on this, and your interest in creating a non-native toolchain, both in terms of the fact that you can exit the environment and the support channels that you will (for example, not Apple) when the material is not working.

Some people seem to have successfully used Mono touch , which shares (some) similarities.

+2
source share

I hope you will soon see some information about the slider, which will give you a better idea of ​​the timeframe. Flex 4 will be released soon, and as soon as this happens, you should start getting more specific information about the slider.

Keep in mind that Slider will be based on the Flex 4 architecture. To give you an idea of ​​how this works, you can check out James Ward's blog post - http://www.jamesward.com/2010/02/21/flex -performance-on-mobile-devices / - he got a couple of videos that show the Flex 4 list running on the Nexus One.

This is not an iPad / iPhone, but Flex is not what Adobe recommends for mobile devices, but this basic example works very well. And that should give you an idea of ​​how Slider can look / behave.

= Ryan ryan@adobe.com

+2
source share

Interestingly, Apple's new development agreement casts doubt on whether applications built using Flash / Flex will be allowed:

3.3.1. Applications can only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple, and should not use or use any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C ++ or JavaScript, as is done by the WebKit engine for iPhone OS, and only code written in C, C ++ and Objective-C can be compiled and directly linked to Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that reference Documented APIs through intermediary translation or a compatibility level or tool are prohibited).

+2
source share

There are two problems with this:

  • Steve Jobs says he is not going to support Flash on the iPhone or iPad.

  • Adobe next rev will let you design in Flex and port for iPhone.

Do the math.

0
source share

If you want to start developing your iPhone, iPa, or Mac OSX, I would suggest learning Objective-C. It probably takes less time than waiting for the (official) Flash support on these devices ... Take it the other way around, would you use Objective-C to develop Flash or Flex applications?

0
source share

More articles:


All Articles