Early this morning at the MAX 2009 Conference, Adobe previewed Flash Professional CS5 and announced that the new release will let Flash developers export their files as iPhone apps. The significance of this announcement is that development time for thousands of Flash-based gaming and music companies will be cut significantly. In the past, developers have had to create separate iPhone apps and web-based tools. While this is not the Flash plugin for Safari that many have asked for, the closed-beta version of Flash Professional CS5 eliminates the need for separate iPhone development. In other words, developers avoid building their applications twice.
Lumosity, a learning games community with more than 1 million members and a Flash-based iPhone portal, is particularly excited to see the CS5 announcement. Said resident game designer Ben Katz, “We release new products every month. This is an interesting solution that Adobe’s decided to pursue, and so far it looks like the transition will be smooth. Our development time will depend on whether these applications actually look and feel like native apps.”
High-traffic Flash-based gaming communities like Lumosity, Newgrounds and PopCap Games will be some of the first groups to utilize Flash’s Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure. If these groups really do find the Flash customization as easy as it sounds, Adobe will be opening the floodgates to casual gaming. PopCap’s titles alone have been downloaded more than 1 billion times by consumers worldwide. With reduced development time, it will be interesting to see the fortunes amassed by gaming houses. Some of the light games that have already been created using CS5 include Chroma Circuit, Fickleblox and Just Letters.
