So you heard it right, we have brought the Flash Platform to the iPhone OS for applications.  In fact some of the applications are already on the Apple AppStore for you to download

We thought it was fun to put them up in secret and working with a very very small set of developers, and our engineering teams I think we’ve really proven that Flash can run effectively on the iPhone without changes.

The applications are:

• Just Letters
• Finger Paint
• Red Hood
• Chroma Circuit
• FickleBlox
• That Roach Game
• Trading Stuff
• South Park Avatar Creator

Enabling the Flash Platform to run on the iPhone has been a really tough task, and one that results in some limitations.  Though you have told us that this is a top priority for your mobile projects, and so we’ve worked for over a year to build this solution.

For developers the new tooling will be made available with the Flash Professional tool, which will also be in pre-release later this year. So today you can begin your work on mobile devices targeting Flash Player 10, or Adobe AIR 2.0 Apis in time.

One caveat of this Ahead of Time compilation method is that we can only use AS3 code.  AOT compilation means that we have no interpreter on the device, as per Apple’s restriction.  Without the interpreter you won’t be able to load SWFs unless they were packaged with your application, boo Apple

This new tool set and a subset of apis from Adobe AIR will have all manner of features enabled, along with the hardware acceleration, battery, memory and rendering performance increases that we have worked on in Flash Player 10.1.

Some typical iPhone features that are not supported are:
• Photo selection from file system
• Contact selection from the address book
• Camera
• Cut/copy/paste
• Accessory support
• In app purchase support
• Peer to peer
• Maps
• iPod library access
• Compass
• Push notifications
• Audio recording
• Video recording
• Parental controls

Of course because of the huge amount of work involved, and lack of public API access from Apple we have to drop a few Flash features too.

• Embedded HTML content
• RTMPE (this was our call)
• H.264 Video (you can use URLRequest)
• Dynamically loading SWFs (containing AS3 code)
• PixelBender

So what about Flex?  Well here at Adobe MAX we’ll have a session specifically around Adobe Flex Mobile Framework, codename “Slider”.  We expect that in time we’ll enable this version of the framework to run effectively on the iPhone.  You’ll be using the same tools, Apis and core framework elements.

Although there would be nothing technically stopping you from using Flex, you would suffer huge performance penalties, and have to re-write the components for mobile and device interactions.

Go and get started then today!