The bunfight seems to have calmed down from the dizzy heights of the iPhone OS vs Flash storm earlier this year. Adobe or at least Flash was on the ropes and taking a battering.

Adobe had a few interesting innovations that were almost ignored in the melee. Their response to the Flash v’s HTML5 tirade seemed to be that Flash is a great platform to develop on, then you can spit out Flash, iPhone Apps, HTML5 etc. The HTML5 exporter seemed to get lost in translation.

Nice to see Adobe putting it back onto the agenda with their new inspiration site The Expressive Web. It was put together with US uber agency Big Spaceship and is a great inspiration and learning resource for the latest HTML and CSS techniques like transition, audio and the like. Sure, the zealots will get all sniffy, like the Adobe moniker has tainted the purity of the code, but we’re more grown up than that, aren’t we?

Looks like those penguins down at Club Penguin are being put to good use. Just noticed this little Easter egg… Go to the homepage of Club Penguin, click Play Now and zoom into the lower part of the screen (expand your browser window). Looks like they are using AS2 though… god help us when they figure out HTML5! Still, I assume they are working on Linux :)

Just watched Lee Brimlow’s quick demo of Flash CS5 saving out an iPhone app. Watch it!

Now, first things first, we’ve made a few iPhone apps at Digital Outlook already in native Objective C and although I’m nowhere near being even remotely classed as a developer, I have been on a basic iPhone dev course and have spent a good length of time debugging and mildly fiddling with the existing apps we have. I’ve made a few simple apps myself so I’ve got a fair understanding of how it works I guess.

I’ve also go a VERY acute understanding of the process and costs involved in creating a native iPhone app from scratch from within an agency. At the beginning, they said “take a Flash app, budget the coding part, double it and add another half”. Cool. Nowhere near. Without going into detail, it seems iPhone App development isn’t quite as simple as it’s made out to be. Yes, your developer may know Objective C, applying it to the iPhone development environment is another thing. Us Flash guys could only stare on as seemingly simple issues took days and weeks to resolve.

So the fact that the Flash SC5 release will compile to iPhone is immense news for me, us and probably every digital agency and Flash freelancer on the planet. Sure there are things it can’t do. Sure you get a bundled app that you can’t ‘add to’ in the native development environment. Sure you can’t use the camera and a few other api’s. And it may be a bit slower than a native app, but take it from me, I’ll take all of those on the chin for the ability to get a creative idea onto the iPhone and into the hands of the world’s mobile consumers.

I can’t wait for CS5 to drop but in the mean time, here are some of my observations from native iPhone development from my Flash perspective.

• Objective C may look like AS3 but it works in a whole different way. From declaring variables to having a .h header file to your .m main class files. Don’t even think of using a ‘Trace’ or C ‘Print’ command. Underestimate the differences at your peril… but don’t be scared either. If I can do it, so can you! (No, seriously, I’m not that clever).
• Debugging already written code is really easy when you know your way way around. Moving graphics, font sizes, swapping sounds, changing text etc. are all pretty straightforward with a simple search to narrow down the location to work on.
• The assets are held externally to the project, so changing graphics, movies, audio etc. is simple too, just swap out the file and recompile.
• The graphics are just plain old JPEGs and PNG files, so your designers are more than up to the job. It’s just like a Flash project as far as that goes.
• If you have time / money, put a rough Flash demo together first. Changing your mind and feature creep during production can be slow and costly.
• The iPhone development suite is really slick (unlike Android I may add!). The on-screen emulator is great and allows you do test it (with a few exceptions) without needing an iPhone or a developer account.
• If your app uses accelerometers, cameras etc. the emulator will fall short as it’s can’t ‘emulate’ an accelerometer. You can get around it by installing an app on your phone to transmit the accelerometer data to your mac, then add a little code to your iPhone build to receive the data and substitute the values in the emulator. Here’s an example of screen-capturing the emulator using this technique. See the Accelerometer Simulator by Otto Chrons for more.
• The icon is VERY important. Make sure you spend time on it. And by the way, the glassy shine and round corners are automatically added to your icon on the phone itself. You can switch the shine off though, but not the corners.
• If you don’t have them in-house, freelance iPhone developers will charge you anywhere from £250-£500 a day.
• If you shop around and do your research, you soon find out that the cheap way to get an iPhone app done is to go ‘off-shore’. South America, China and India are all much cheaper than your average LA, London or New York dev agency. However, they do come with the usual health warnings about production values, creative sign-off and time-zone / communication problems.
• If you have the money and it’s your first app, get someone local to hold your hand and learn from. If not, make sure you have scoped the project within an inch of its life. After the project, budget for an extra half-day for your iPhone dev to explain what he/she did to your Flash dev team. Shame to pay all that money and lose all the knowledge.
• Memory management is now your problem. You have to allocate memory and release it as you go. This is one of the big areas that Apple check when you submit your app to the App Store. You don’t have to allocate actual memory size as in assembly language, but you do have to ‘manage’ closely.
• Do register with Apple and get a developer account. You can get the dev environment for free and start compiling but you can’t transfer anything onto your iPhone without a developer license and associated provisioning files.
• While I mention it, the process to authorise your computer and set up your first app is a bit of a faff. Still not 100% sure I understand it but the instructions on the Apple site are clear enough to get you started.
• The app submission process is pretty simple and the time taken to get a response is anywhere from 2-4 weeks. I know the guys at Apple and even they can’t affect this process, so don’t ask! However, in general, if your app is basic and doesn’t have any advanced functionality such as external database calls or live data, you go into a ‘less risky’ pool, and are generally through in less time. If you are rejected, you go to the back of the queue.
• Make sure you look at what everyone else is doing too. Download everything remotely related to compare. Look at the top 3 in each category too, there’s a reason they are there, whether it’s the content, the execution or the user-interaction. It’s all vital knowledge.
• The ‘Games’ category is the most varied and the most competitive. Before you assume your first app should be a game, consider that it will be up against the EA’s and the Need for Speed’s of this world. If you’re not in the top 20 pretty quickly, you pretty much free-fall until you become all but invisible to the regular browsers.
• To charge or not to charge? 59p says “Aaaah, hell, why not”. £2.99 says “This better be good or I’ll tell everyone it’s a rip off and rate it 1 star”. Initially, you need to go for ratings, so consider an introductory low rate then change it if you see an appetite and good ratings. It’s easy to change the price on the fly.
• And finally, if you can wait until April 2010, consider using Flash CS5! :)