Great News For Developers: iOS iPhone

In April 2010 Adobe released Creative Suite 5. Among all of the amazing features of this release was one feature that allows Flash Developers to export their Flash developed Apps as native iOS (.IPA) Apps from Flash Professional CS5. However, due to a change in Apple's developer agreement the future of this technology was unclear as Apple basically changed their agreement in ways that would potentially block Apps that were not created with Apple's tools. Well yesterday Apple changed this policy and I couldn't be happier for the developer community! This is great news for developers and we’re hearing from our developer community that Packager apps are already being approved for the App Store. I should point out that Apple’s restriction on Flash content running in the browser on iOS devices remains in place.

Adobe will continue to work with key industry partners, including Google, RIM, Nokia, Motorola and Palm/HP to enable their device users to browse the full web through Flash Player 10.1 and run standalone applications on AIR. We are excited about the great progress our partners are making as they deliver the first smartphones to market with full Flash support.

 

The Video I Never Got To Show

You might remember my popular series "My Top 5 Favorite Features of CS5" that I ran on YouTube and my Creative Suite Video Podcast. I recorded those videos right before the official release of CS5. However, I chose to re-record my Flash/Dreamweaver video because I felt there was no need to talk about the iOS App Packager in Flash CS5 since Apps created with this technology could have been potentially blocked from the App Store. Well now I finally get to show you the video that I intended to show from the beginning. Here's my "original" Top 5 Favorite Features of Dreamweaver and Flash CS5. I think you'll like the last feature 🙂 :

 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgVmH8GMvnw

 

 

By the way, don't forget to check out Adobe's iOS Apps here.

5 Nice Surprises in iOS 4

Like many of you, I upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4 yesterday. I'm traveling in France and the upgrade went great. No glitches or problems reactivating. I was also very happy that it didn't wipe the phone and make me restore all my content (especially since I sync media from an iMac at home). I'm very happy (almost giddy) with the folder management for Apps and the unified inbox for Mail (one of my pet peeves since day one!). Although I've been trying to keep up on the new features as best I could while traveling, there were a few pleasant surprises that I hadn't seen listed anywhere.

 

1 Notes Syncing Over the Air

It's about freaking time! I never understood why you could sync Contacts, Calendars, etc. via MobileMe, but not Notes to the iPhone (3.x) over the air. Well it's here now and you can do it with MobileMe or ANY IMAP based email service! Woohoo! Finally!

 

2 Calendars On/Off

One of the things that surprised me about the iPad's calendar made it's way into iOS 4 for the iPhone and that's the ability to turn calendar displays on/off individually. I cheered! In previous iPhone OS 3.x you could either look at an individual calendar or ALL calendars. I have lots of calendars on my iPhone, but don't need to see them ALL all the time. It's great having a unified calendar view of just the calendars I want to see. However, performance definitely took a hit here. It's sloooooooooooooooooooooow scrolling my calendar in List view for some reason (even though I've now turned most calendars off).

 

3 iTunes Playlist Creation

A nice touch that I didn't see coming. You can now create a Real Playlist complete with a name on the fly and add any of your songs to it right on the iPhone itself. It will sync back to iTunes on your next sync.

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