Comments Off// Posted in Uncategorized by Jeremy Rue on 04.14.10.

Thanks Apple for killing any hope of bringing the world of iPhone development to the masses.

In case you haven’t heard the news, Apple has some new language in its Terms Of Service that state you can only use their tools to build iPhone applications. The timing of this news is conspicuous, because Adobe just released their next version of Flash CS5, which has features whereby you can take a Flash application and turn it into a native iPhone application.

I teach Flash at the Berkeley J-School. Flash and ActionScript are much easier to learn than the programming language Apple uses — Objective-C. That language is for hard-core programmers. But Flash on the other hand is a much easier platform to build on. I had planned to teach a class where students would build an iPhone app from scratch. Now, we’ll have to see what happens with this class.

I know there are some people who think making it easier to produce iPhone apps might open a floodgate of inane apps (as if there aren’t already too many of those). But building a application with Flash would have gone through the same provisions as standard apps, and the same review process by Apple. I feel opening it up to more than just programmers presents a tremendous opportunity for smaller operations that could build applications that cater to niche markets or communities.

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