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Comment by Anon84 | Hacker News Reader

     20. Adobe CS5 makes biggest splash in the “Objective-C 
     is hard, here’s another way to make iPhone applications”
     space.

This can be pretty big. Specially if Apple releases the fabled iSlate with an iPhone-like OS (although I hope it's a touch based feline). All the little flash games and apps out there would suddenly become deployable in Apple hardware and Steve Jobs would all of a sudden get a gazilion more developers (for free) to help him push all of his lovely hardware.

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There's still a number of factors this depends on before it becomes big.

I'm guessing how it will work is the iPhone apps will consist of an embedded (in the app) flash platform that just plays the native flash code. This will require Adobe to build a native flash player that doesn't suck

Flash devs have to be willing to get a Mac and pay Apple their $99

I'm guessing (again) that Flash based games won't be able to have the same performance as native ones. The Flash player need to be able to be fast enough for some decent games that people will be willing to pay for

The iPhone UI is quite different from kb + mouse based UI, so most things will require a bit of a rethink regarding how the user interacts

It's interesting the tech media has not covered the fact that Adobe failed to deliver on their promises of a beta of Flash 10 for Android (October) and the Palm Pre ("by the end of the year") Makes me think things aren't going swimmingly behind the scenes at Adobe.

Not quite.

Adobe is using LLVM to translate ActionScript into native ARM assembly. No flash needed. See http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html and http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Applications_for_iPhone...

thanks, didn't know about this. Be interesting to see what happens

That just replaces their Actionscript interpreter + VM + JIT implementation toolchain, which was already awesome.

What everyone complains about the terrible quality of is the Runtime, which sucks ass on every platform but desktop Windows (where it is decent), and will continue to for the forseeable future.

I heard the frame-rate is les horrible! 12fps for very simple flash games when running on mobile platforms. Maybe the tablet will run flash better, but I don't really see Apple having much of an interest in enabling this.

doesn't Adobe all ready have a LLVM backend to target the iPhone from ActionScript3?

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