Futuresplash and iPhonePodPad

HallowedFaith

So let's talk about a little packager inside Flash CS5 that will convert flash projects to iPhone/iPad apps.
(Sidenote: this is half developer half consumer topic, so I don't consider it a "programming" thread.)

When news first struck of this, the developer community as a whole was all "LOL IT WILL PRINT MONEY."

Made this just for this:


And then Apple tossed a big "fuck you" towards Adobe when they changed their SDK licensing to essentially say "If it wasn't made on an Apple product without Apples permission while sucking Apples dick, it can't be on the App store." - I mean, pretty much right?

And then the side effect of course is that a fucking billion flash developers around the world were all "Fuck my life, I only have skills with keyframes and code snippets I edit that I nest into decompiled flash files I "borrow" from flash template websites."

So now here we are, and the point of this thread. I have good mind to say that the iPhone OS Packager in Flash works well, there are some limitations as to the resources carried over from the physical features, such as motion, but it does work well.

However, is this really a good thing? On one end you see the garbage of the world just flood the App store. Millions of "Flash Apps" we have already seen before, copied and re-copied. On the other end, it allows for developmental freedom and innovation from those little gems that always pop out on a new medium, developing something amazing. I myself am torn on the issue and I am interested in the thoughts of others because at the end of the day, the people I work with are fucking retarded and anything outside of "lol I got a txt from u" is asking too much.

Houndx

I think missing out on any apps is a bad thing. A flood of crappy apps would work itself out because no one would buy them. Heck, there's plenty of them as it is.

Jasconius

Even Adobe's DEVNET site indicates that the Flash->iPhone compilation can still result in slow performance. They warn that some things in FLA's simply will not run well when compiled.

The thing that separates what Adobe did from what will likely end up being a legit product like Unity is that Adobe basically compiles straight to iPhone OS compatible assembly, whereas Unity merely spits out a usable and editable Xcode project.

I am by trade a Flash developer and I also work on iPhone software. My opinion on this is: learn the fucking language.

Instead of bitching about how Apple has screwed you and writing an angry blog post and sending letters to Apple, learn the shit you need to know in order to write native apps effectively and efficiently.

The things that Flash lets you do on the iPhone quickly, or at least, faster than what you could do with the native API's are relatively small, and those are things that are not really platform consistent anyway, such as fullscreen non-native interfaces (since you cannot access any native interface controls when compiling from Flash).


Apple has a legitimate business interest in barring these sort of applications, because they have the consumer equivalent of SLA's for their hardware that is their charge to maintain, and even a roughshod compiled FLA can undermine that.


Frankly, Adobe deserves this. Any company that lets their misguided product managers (and, the product managers for Flash are historically horrible) invest millions of dollars in a flagship feature for your big product update that exists entirely at the mercy of a company that is more or less your rival, deserves whatever it gets.



Writing a Flash app compiled to the iPhone is comparable to something like an old school UNIX/Linux application running on OS X via X11. Looks like shit, runs mediocrely, and feels woefully out of place. NOPE.

HallowedFaith

And I am totally support that idea. Hell I am satisfied with the simple "It's a free world they can do what they want."

The more I actually think about it, the only thing Flash ever really gave us was a few awesome games, and video playback.

And I put a lot of thought into what you said.

"Frankly, Adobe deserves this. Any company that lets their misguided product managers (and, the product managers for Flash are historically horrible) invest millions of dollars in a flagship feature for your big product update that exists entirely at the mercy of a company that is more or less your rival, deserves whatever it gets."

I see them as rivals, but at the same time, they are kind of.. the yin and yang from the software aspect. Adobe needs platforms to publish on and Apple needs software to set the "standards", especially since Apple computers are toted as the best thing for media. In the afterthought, I am more than willing to welcome a new platform of media presentation so long as it's universal and it works. I just don't see that happening.