Ok, so you are now an iPhlash developer, creating cutting edge iPhone apps with the Flex Mobile Framework, AIR and Flash CS5. Things are looking pretty rosy and you can be sure the offers of work are going to start rolling in along with the cash. Who needs Objective C ay? You’re an Actionscript 3 developer … you can build amazing applications and now you can build them for the iPhone … you rock! Hey, what’s that … an email from your client asking if you could build a small marketing app for the iPhone … and they want to pay you a stupid amount of money! Result! Of course you can … you’re now an iPhlash developer!

Cool … the project is go and here’s a design from their Art Director …

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now you know I’ve only got love for Flash but I hope you understand the point of this post. Scenario’s like this are gonna bite people in the arse unless they are careful about what they promise their clients. You need that Cocoa UIKit. You need Interface Builder. There’s so much in the iPhone SDK that you will need to build proper iPhone apps.

Let’s be realistic about this … we’re not talking about building apps for the browser or even for AIR. If you build an application for an OS then it is best-practice to adhere to the rules of that OS and use the common UI tools made available. If you own a mac then I think you would agree that when you download and install an app you want to feel comfortable using it. You want the reassurance that the application you are using integrates with the rest of the OS so you can quickly get your head around how it works. This is why the HIG exists and this is why Apple will deny any attempt to reproduce their UIKit components.

Unless your building a game with no OS UI requirements or your app is a bit of eye-candy then you’d be better off building it with XCode. Hopefully Adobe will expand on what they’ve started by creating tools that will let us export assets or views from Flash Builder to Cocoa Obj-C code. It would be great if we could export our project to a View and then integrate it into an iPhone app. There’s already a great tool built in AIR for exporting shapes from SWF to Obj-C that you can view here.

I know that the Flash community are an ingenious bunch and the majority of them aren’t stupid either so I hope that this is just the incentive they need to build some really useful tools that will enable us to build proper iPhone apps in the near future. Until then you’d be best not to promise your clients you’ll be porting over their web apps to the iPhone just yet … not until you’ve discussed the requirements IN DEPTH.

This post by Jeff LaMarche is a much more eloquent argument about why we should all step back and have a re-think about this. Especially how this may effect the relationship between Adobe and Apple. Hopefully Jeff will have some further comments to make on the subject and I invite him to do so here too.

From Jeff …

If I were a Flash developer, I wouldn’t cheer just yet. This looks like a risky proposition to me at present. Adobe and Apple are still acting in an antagonistic fashion toward each other. Adobe could very well have crossed the line here. There are both legal and technical options open to Apple to prevent Adobe from doing this if they choose to. Will they? I honestly don’t know. Apple still makes money from apps that are created with Flash tools, so they might just ignore it and take their 30% cut quietly.