As one of iPhone developers, I've enjoyed reading about the issue with Flash for iPhone (see "Adobe CEO: Flash on iPhone not easy"). Flash lite is a joke (not compatible with Flash on the web today), but the latest Flash is too big and too heavy for iPhone.
What is the answer? More memory and faster CPU on iPhone? Re-architected Flash that can take advantage of iPhone's powerful GPU?
I think the answer is 'No'. We don't need Flash on iPhone.
If you want to develop a serious graphical application on iPhone, get Xcode and write code in Objective C - just like other thousands of iPhone developers do (including myself). It is different from C++ or Javascript and requires a little bit patient at the beginning, but it's really fun and and easy development environment.
If you want to add some eye-catchy animations on your web site that are also accessible from iPhone. Use Javascript (see our
web-site). Latest browsers are powerful enough to handle most of animations you need. The development environment is not as rich as Flash, but it's 100% free and there are a lot of open source libraries out there (such as
ianime.js, which is a light-weight animation library optimized for iPhone).
It is important to recognize that Safari on iPhone already takes advantage of its GPU. This is why the Javascript-based animation is quite feasible on iPhone. Flash has a very CPU-heavy architecture, and this is why it is so difficult to run Flash (real Flash, not Flash lite) on iPhone.
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