Good news folks! If you use Flash and live in an alternate reality where Apple and Adobe get along just fine then you’ll probably find this tutorial quite useful. It details how to get the best performance when writing apps with Flash CS5 Professional’s Packager for iPhone.

I suppose for everybody else there’s nothing stopping you using Flash to quickly prototype your apps before committing to Objective C. What’s written in my tutorial will also benefit those wishing to target the Android platform and shows how to take advantage of a device’s GPU to increase animation performance.

Sure glad I only spent 5 minutes putting the tutorial together. It would have been quite irritating if I’d spent a few weeks on it only to find out Steve Jobs had changed the developers license agreement rendering all my hard work useless.

So anyway, here it is:

• Packager for iPhone: Animation Render Performance

I’m a big fan of Adobe Device Central and have been using it over the years on various mobile projects. It really was a lifesaver when porting my GamesFlash project from S60 3rd Edition smartphones to the mass market Symbian Series 40 handsets. With their limited CPU and memory constraints, every byte saved mattered and optimising in order to gain maximum performance was critical.

Device Central’s huge catalogue of devices and its ability to accurately simulate the performance of these devices made it possible to test my code without having to spend a fortune on hardware. The Memory Inspector was an ideal way to check if my code was about to blow the heap on any one device, and was great for identifying areas of code that were consuming too much RAM.

However there have been some glaring omissions that Adobe are thankfully rectifying in Device Central CS5. For the first time you’ll be able to actually use the Flash debugger when running content within the device emulator. It’s hard to believe this feature wasn’t made available sooner but I’m delighted that it is finally making it into a release. The other great feature I’m looking forward to is the ability to emulate a device’s on-board accelerometer.

Take a look at the two videos from Adobe Platform Evangelist Mark Doherty as he gives a guided tour of some of these new features.

So Apple has just changed its developer agreement for those wishing to access the iPhone Developer Program and it could spell the end for Adobe’s iPhone Packager before it has even been released. Here’s the worrying snippet:

3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

With Apple and Adobe not exactly being the best of friends at the moment it is very possible that this is another blatant attempt by Apple to make Flash irrelevant. Unfortunately these new terms and conditions would also have serious implications for the excellent Unity development platform too.

Fingers crossed it’s just a big misunderstanding.

Been holding your breath for Flash Professional CS5? Well Adobe have finally announced that it’ll be available from April 12th. CS5 has an impressive list of new features but I’m sure as always there will be someone out there who has just had a great idea that isn’t going to appear in this release.

To be honest I think the Adobe engineers will probably try and strangle you if you ask them to squeeze it into CS5 this close to release, but all is not lost. You see, those kind people at Adobe have created Adobe Labs Ideas where you can suggest new features for future versions of Flash or vote for a suggestion that’s already been added. So what are you waiting for?

So far, here’s the suggestion that seems to have gotten most votes.

It would be nice if Flash CS5 could automatically inject some humanity and rationale into Steve Jobs and make him realize Apple (and thus, he) cannot grip the Interwebs in an iron fist of greed and censorship. I understand this may take a few unusual new class files and data objects, but I have faith in the Adobe team’s superior engineering capabilities.

I imagine it won’t be that hard to implement. Oh and while they’re at it I hope Adobe take my own feature request seriously. Again, it should be fairly easy to implement:

I’d like a class that allows mobile phones to be used as real lightsabers. The API should allow a blade of plasma energy to be extended for one meter from the end of the handset. It should also allow for the colour to be adjusted between blue, green and red.

Thanks Adobe! Looking forward to seeing these two features implemented in Flash Professional CS6.

Adobe have released a video showing off some more apps created using Flash Pro CS5. What I’ve seen so far is very encouraging and the performance seems to be significantly better compared to some of the earlier releases they announced during MAX.

These apps are available on the App Store along with others that are steadily being released by many of the developers taking part in the closed beta. As well as downloading those in the video you might also want to take a look at Takayuki Fukatsu’s iPhone Metronome and BlueskyNorth’s FickleBlox.

Good news boys and girls. Steve Jobs might be trying his damnedest to keep Flash off all his shiny new toys but that hasn’t stopped Adobe from ensuring that those using the upcoming Flash Pro CS5 will be able to create applications that will run on the iPad. Content compiled using Flash’s iPhone Packager will happily run on the iPad as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It doesn’t look like they’ll support the iPad’s full screen-resolution in the initial release – I guess there’s simply no time left to add any new features before launch, but it’s clear from this quote taken from the Adobe Flash Platform Blog that it won’t be long before full-screen support arrives.

It is our intent to make it possible for Flash developers to build applications that can take advantage of the increased screen size and resolution of the iPad.

Good news and it’ll be interesting to see what innovative applications the Flash community come up with.

It’s the simple things that make me happy. Conditional compilation is one such thing and although it has been available since Flash CS4 those developing for mobile have been unable to take advantage of it. Why? Well to-date mobile developers have been limited to Flash Lite and ActionScript 1/2, whereas conditional compilation is only available when writing ActionScript 3.

This has been a real shame since Flash Lite developers arguably require conditional compilation more than any other Flash developer. Take my GamesFlash project as an example. I targetted over 50 different handsets and also wanted to ensure that it would run within a web browser for demonstration purposes. Considering the varying specifications across my target devices I quite often had to remove features from certain builds – streaming video being a feature that was only supported by the S60 devices. Without conditional compilation doing this can be a side-project in itself.

Sure, there are ways around it. For example, you can write multiple versions of certain classes (a feature rich version of a class for high-end handsets and a more modest version for low-end devices), store them in different folders, then using multiple profiles, point each profile’s class path to the correct folder for the version of the class that’s required. This approach works well for those going down the object oriented route, but for many Flash Lite developers this won’t be the case and including/excluding code from certain builds will suddenly become more difficult.

Thankfully developing iPhone apps using Flash CS5 won’t have these problems since it’s the first time that mobile developers using Flash will be able to take advantage of ActionScript 3. The following snippet of code illustrates just how useful conditional compilation can be:

private function setup() :void
{
    CONFIG::WEB
    {
        // Add lots of complex shapes - we've got the CPU.
        addShapes( new ComplexShape(), 1000 );
    }

    CONFIG::IPHONE_3G
    {
        // Add a modest number of simple shapes - we don't have much CPU.
        addShapes( new SimpleShape(), 50 );
    }

    CONFIG::IPHONE_3GS
    {
        // Add lots of simple shapes - we have some more CPU.
        addShapes( new SimpleShape(), 100 );
    }
}

The example above expects there to be three config constants set via the Publish Settings panel in Flash: CONFIG::IPHONE_3G, CONFIG::IPHONE_3GS and CONFIG::WEB. Depending on the build I want to make I can set certain constants to true or false, or alternatively create multiple profiles with different configurations for these constants and simply select the desired profile. This should make life so much easier.

So what about Flash Lite developers? Well if you’re developing for any of the current Flash Lite players you’re still going to run into the same frustrating problem. However there is light at the end of the tunnel. Flash Lite 4 and Flash Player 10 for mobile are on the horizon, and with both offering support for ActionScript 3, building for multiple targets will become a whole lot easier.

Bad news for anyone waiting to get their hands on the Flash CS5 public beta. Adobe have just announced that in order to deliver the final version of Flash CS5 as soon as possible they’ve cancelled the beta release that was to be made available at the end of the month.

Adobe’s announcement at Max in October that the latest release of Flash would allow developers to target the iPhone has helped generate a significant amount of buzz, making CS5 one of the most anticipated releases of Flash in some time.

More info can be found in this FAQ section on Adobe Labs.

I’ve been quite impressed by the announced features for Flash CS5, with the ability to write apps for iPhone being the one that has gotten the Flash community most excited.

One upcoming feature that seems to have been overlooked by most people that I’m particularly looking forward to however is the new XML based FLA format. Anyone who uses source control will know what a pain it is trying to merge FLA files back to the trunk from a branch. You’ve basically got two options.

1. Open the two FLAs and attempt to manually copy the new changes from the branched version back onto the trunk. 
2. Simply copy the branched version over the trunk version and hope that you don’t inadvertently destroy someone else’s changes that have already made it onto the trunk.

With FLA files now being saved out as XML we no longer need to worry about this, instead letting a merge tool do the work for us. The other added bonus is that this should theoretically allow multiple developers to concurrently edit the same FLA.

XML based FLA files open up a host of other interesting opportunities. For the first time you’ll be able to write code to dynamically create FLA files, or simply parse an existing XML FLA file before making changes to it. It’s all good stuff.