New tutorial on CS5 AS3 iPhone dev reveals improvements
Lee Brimelow, noted Flash Evangelist for Adobe, has posted a new tutorial at gotoandlearn.com on developing iPhone apps in the forthcoming Flash CS5 beta:
http://gotoandlearn.com/play?id=116
While the tutorial itself gives a clearer illustration of the development process, what's more interesting are some of the notable details that clarify or improve upon the MAX announcement back in October.
Perhaps most intriguing is the hardware accelerated demo at the end of the video, which definitely contradicts the relatively poor performance of some of the demo apps already in the app store, and is impressive versus those case studies that Adobe initially revealed.
Even more notably, Adobe has clearly made some substantial headway on the file size bloat issue. 8-9MB base weights were initially stated by Adobe at the MAX announcement, however the test app exported here weighs in at 3.2MB:
- File size as shown in iTunes
It should be noted that this is not a final compile for distribution, which could potentially add more weight (only Adobe knows for sure at this point), but it does appear that Adobe has put some effort into fixing that glaring problem. Bearing in mind that apps over 10MB in size require WiFi to download apps over the air to the iPhone, a high base weight poses a significant barrier to entry for end users to install even the simplest of AS3 based apps.
Also seen in this tutorial is the new 'flash.sensors' package, part of the 10.1 (and likely future Flash Player 11 release) which gives access to device interactions. In this demo, we see an implementation of the accelerometer class on the iPhone, and Lee does note that this will, as expected, be accessible with other 10.1 enabled mobile devices.
Finally, Adobe made it a point at MAX to be very clear about the lengthy compile times for iPhone applications, potentially in the neighborhood of five minutes in length. While this tutorial is for as basic as an app can get, the app demonstrated her takes a mere 38 seconds to compile. Again, this is not a distribution compile, but compile time issues aren't a concern for one-off compiles for distribution. Rather, it's the time suck of test builds that are potential deal breakers. 38 seconds is a promising number, but it remains to be seen what real world app compile times will wind up at when the Flash CS5 beta drops on Adobe Labs, which this tutorial further confirms as on track for the end of this year.
Lee's original post on theflashblog.com can be found here:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1510
Jeff dePascale is a web and mobile applications professional based in Fairfield County, CT.
