iPhone, Flash, and Multi-touch
Steve Jobs recently announced at the WWDC that the iPhone will be able to allow developers to develop iPhone apps using the Safari browser as a platform (video). “We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure, and we’ve come up with a very sweet solution.” There’s no SDK, you use web technologies and deliver your apps via the web.
Developer response to this has been cold, but I think this is could be a boon for web developers. Applications written using the Safari platform would have full access to iPhone services, and would presumably use Webkit for UI display. The only drawback I see is that writing responsive, tactile applications that can utilize the full capabilities of the iPhone would be nearly impossible using AJAX.
Of course, being a Flash developer, I immediately think about how Flash could be used on such a device. Since iPhone will contain a “full Safari engine”, it would need to support the full Flash plugin. Flash would be an ideal way to build dynamic, rich interfaces for the iPhone. There is the question, though, of speed. The iPhone would most likely have a very limited processor, and the OS would only be optimized for the core rendering engine.
I’m also curious about how developers will be able to take advantage of the multi-touch interface. They demonstrated multi-touch in the demo, but it was a bit of a trick - they were simply viewing a large image in Safari and zooming into it (it was not integrated into an app at that point.) Will there be any support for that via some sort of service? Could that touch information be passed to Flash?
