Jeff Rock

On Authoring iPhone Apps via Flash CS5

Ok, maybe I should expound beyond sweet christbabyjesus no. I have a feeling that post could turn into one of those posts that needs more explanation.

Bottom line: you can’t compile Actionscript 3 into an iPhone app. Adobe has written some type of selective AS3 to ObjC translator. Reasons that you don’t want to use that:

Bugs. It’s tough enough bug testing Objective-C natively, let alone through some black-box made by Adobe. I hope you’re into non-descriptive error boxes.
Memory management. Do you really want to trust a third party to retain and release objects for you? This is not something best left to someone else.
SDK changes. Apple moves at the rate of Apple. Keeping up with their SDK changes is vital and waiting for Adobe (or anyone other than you) to address these changes is not smart.
HIG-busting. I’ve read through the FAQ and it doesn’t look like you get access to UIKit. So you can’t use any of Apple’s excellent interface controls. So you get whatever convoluted mess of a UI the developer wants to cobble together in Flash. I’ll let you think about that for a moment.
Ability. You don’t even get the whole SDK. Just what Adobe feels like supporting. If you get knee deep in a project and realize that you need access to an Apple API that you can’t get to, you’ll be out of luck.

All those things add up to a non-reliable entity becoming your single point of failure. And lest we forget, Adobe can barely write Objective-C apps themselves. We’re still waiting for an update to CS4 that makes it not crash when you move the mouse too fast. You really want to trust them to manage your memory, translate your code and keep up with Apple’s SDK?

Let me know how that works out for you.