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.

I am now the proud owner of the Hex colour #BADA55 or Bad Ass to give it its official name. Well, that’s as far as the folks over at http://www.myhexcolor.com are concerned who are selling off all the Hex colours to gullible idiots like myself. I had to own ‘Bad Ass’ though … and it was only $1 (65p).

Apologies to Evan Roth who originally brought it to my attention. But I do sooo totally PWN it now! I may sell it to him if he’s interested.

If you want to buy your own Hex colour you may want to read this post to give you some inspiration.

If you are reading this post there’s a very strong chance that you are at the Flash on the Beach conference and you’ve either been given one of my amazing business cards (thanks Moo) or we’ve just spoken and you’re checking me out to make sure I’m not just a crazy man. Well, the good news is that I am indeed a crazy man but my insanity is fueled by a love of all things Flashy.

Welcome to my site, please take a look around … would you like a cup of tea? A biscuit perhaps? This site is my blog but I have a main corporate site which you’ll find over at http://lyraspace.com. There you’ll find some examples of my work in the Case Studies section and you can read about what I do in Services. Most importantly though, keep in touch! You’ll find my details in the Contact section and please bookmark/feed my site for future reference.

I hope you’re having as much of a great time at FotB as I am (I’ve not even left yet as I write this post) and I hope our meeting has made as much of an impression on you as it has on me (I’ve not technically met anyone at the conference yet).

If we haven’t actually met then please do pop over to point at me and laugh … I’m the small, tubby chap with the stupid looking, over-sized glasses. You may have seen me stumbling off my silver Vespa looking flustered. You’ll also spot me loitering around sources of coffee and trying to steal stickers and t-shirts. Please do say hi.

I’ll continue to tweet my experiences (haven’t started) and you can follow me @leeprobert or @lyraspace depending on whether you want the techy geeky stuff or the downright rude!

Thanks for visiting my blog! See you soon.

I love this. What it would be like if clients treated other professionals the way they treated Freelancers. So very true.

http://www.vendorclientvideo.com/

I bought WoW … or ‘World of Warcraft’ at the weekend. I’ve been curious of MORPG’s for a while and have been considering ‘EVE’ and ‘Star Wars Galaxies’ as well but it was a chance encounter at the Apple Store in Tunbridge Wells that decided my fate. I went to buy a game for my MacBook Pro because I needed something for the long train journeys that wasn’t just Flex development … for my sanity you see? I grabbed a copy of ‘Call of Duty 4′ and went to pay for it. The ‘Apple Man’, as I like to call them, spent five minutes ‘out back’ before returning with a shocked and defeated look on his face; they had no software! I was gutted as you can imagine; I’d worked myself up into a gaming frenzy and was now completely deflated. How could I wait a day or two for Amazon to deliver? The moment would have been gone! I needed to play a game on my Mac tonight no matter what! I headed to ‘Game’.

Now, surely Game would have a very tiny section in the corner with some Mac games in it, right? I looked everywhere, under the bargain bin, around by the PC games section. There was nothing! There was no choice; I had to ask one of the children who worked there. My fears were confirmed. They didn’t sell Mac games but they did have ‘World of Warcraft – Battle Chest box set’ which was labeled as PC MAC DVD and was the only product in the entire shopping precinct that would run on a mac. I bought it and headed home … just after Lyra (my daughter) re-decorated Marks & Spencer’s with the contents of her stomach. She’s ill.

Grabbing 20 minutes between a sickly toddler throwing up on me and a newborn pooping up their own back for giggles I grabbed my MacBook and shoved the DVD into the drive. So confident of the installation process was I that I didn’t even have the machine plugged in … crazy. I began to install.

20 minutes later I returned and indeed it had finished the initial DVD installation. I launched the app. What’s this? It wants to just grab a few patches from the WoW site. I guess it is quite an old disk and I have got 20 minutes of juice left; I’ll pop back in a while. I began the patching process.

20 minutes later I returned and saw that it had indeed finished the first patch but was now engaged in installing another one. Oh dear, I’d better plug my machine in and come back after my tea when the little ones are in bed and I can settle down for a night of ‘fiddling’ on my beast … ooer!

I came back to see it had started another patching process; this time it wanted to install 3.5GB … some people will comment ‘so what?’ but I’m in ‘Rural Broadband Hell’ and so reluctantly I gave a resigned sigh and let the patch continue overnight. My wife was upset because she couldn’t watch iPlayer and I was miserable because I had to ‘read the manual’ instead of actually playing the game.

Overall it took 14 hours solid for the software to completely install and patch on my machine. Just a warning for any ‘Noobs’ out there. Luckily I had a pretty stable connection or it could have taken a week. To anyone out there with a dodgy pipe I would suggest trying to get it off a Torrent site (the patch that is) and if anyone has any links to legal patch files that you can access via BitTorrent then please comment. Indeed I’d wanted to download WoW a while ago but it was just too huge a file to even attempt and BitTorrent seemed too risky.

Overall though, apart from the installation process, WoW runs brilliantly on my MacBook Pro. I have 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card. You can run the game in window mode too so you can still pretend to be working. I was dubious of how it would perform over my slow pipe but it seems to be fine and am looking forward to running it over 3G on the long train journeys.

If anyone wants to kick my ass I’m a dwarf (obviously) called ‘Horsmon’. The name is a derivative of ‘Horsmonden’ which is the village we currently live in … with the crap Broadband!

Finally, does anyone have a Keyboard layout alternative for people without the extended Keyboard on a Mac?

Good luck and don’t /spit! I learnt that from the book … it’s rude apparently.