Iphone development

Some recent news has piqued my interest... After recently trying to pick and choose between potential 3rd party Iphone developers to reverse engineer my Flash Lite application built for our VPAR Live Golf Scoring handset application that I built last year, and the fun of downloading both my code and system design into somebody else's head - There might be another alternative. My colleague Tom Mason, who built and designed the server architecture for the VPAR system pointed me in the direction of an official Adobe Labs video about the subject.

This means its a rumour no more, and Adobe and Apple have obviously been slugging it out in a dark room to reveal a final result. Flash will apparently in the Beta release due end of 2009 of Creative Suite 5 export directly to build Iphone applications...
The theory is that its going to be a compilation option (similar to export to .exe) from the Flash IDE 

Wow... thats great for me and lots of other Flash Developers.


The big questions are:
1) Will you need expensive Apple kit to use it
2) Will it compile older Actionscript 2.0 code, or only Actionscript 3.0

Personally I hope it supports AS2, otherwise Adobe, although always pushing their latest tech will prevent developers like me from easily re-using and publishing older apps without extensive rework.

Its exciting news, I've always been sceptical over the last year with all the talk about Flash for the Iphone, so this delivery method via the Apple App Store for Iphone means that the Cupertino boys are still in control of their beloved "Jesus phone" and more importantly it will keep them supplied with loaves and fishes still.