Flash, Actionscript 1 & 2 based, on the iPhone, now
Thanks to Rob i heard of igameswf the other day.
I had known gameswf for quite a while and tried it before, but yeah, it was quite surprising to see their repository now has a igameswf version up there.
A bunch of things don´t work as they should yet, some things don´t perform as one would like but then it also has some features the Adobe solution won´t have.
I´m getting ahead of myself though, let´s go through it one by one:
Its an xcode project which when compiled and installed nicely runs an app with an swf on the iPhone.
That app itself allows to load and run other swfs from the web.
The default swf in the igameswf is basically an input textfield with a flash made keyboard below it so that one can enter an url to load another swf.
One can replace that swf with a different swf which then performs a bit better than when loaded in at runtime into the container.
The default swf in there is a good indicator for strengths and weaknesses though:
The keyboard already wasn´t very responsive on my iphone 3g (noticable delay between pressing a key and it responding) but i´m sure it would be better on 3gs, maybe even smoothly usable there without any delay, dunno.
Overall the performance was nowhere near to something one for example could have made in unity iPhone or Objective C, but it felt pretty comparable to the flash made apps using the Adobe Packager solution i downloaded from the App Store up to now.
Trying out a few more swfs i noticed that quite a bunch of API side things are not fully implemented yet so if one would want to deploy a full game using this solution one would very likely have to focus on simpler things or test and tweak it a good bit to work around current limitations.
I imagine a similar thing should be the case with the Adobe solution though.
Overall its impressive that
1) with the gameswf solution one has support for more Actionscript versions/ target Player version made for flash content, even if not the full flash API is integrated; the Adobe solution only supports AS3 content made with flash CS5 and upwards, deployed directly as ipa app
2) one can load in other swfs at runtime with code execution for them
3) one can in theory use more of the iPhone sdk and that way iPhone features than with the Adobe solution as it is based on an XCode project deploy manner
Still of course this is in early state, right now it would probably be most useful for creating nice flashy menus, but yeah, nice to have options and definately something interesting, i think Adobe would do great in taking note there on a few ends.
Tags: Development, flash on iPhone, iPhone, multiplatform
