Preview of Flex on iOS devices

As promised, Flex developers will be able to deploy their applications on iOS packager. Thanks to the amazing of both AIR and Flex SDK engineers at Adobe, you'll achieve very performant applications. In this video, I'm using the current engineering builds of Flex and AIR for iOS. This will be officially available for our community in 2011. More to come...

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• adobe
• apple
• flash
• iphone
• ios
• ipad
• flex
• benchmark

[BakaRakuda]

As a developer the point is not simply to allow the developer to be lazy, but to craft the best, most usable software to serve the USER.

Left aligned navigation titles, right aligned back buttons, etc. are inconsistent, not user friendly and not in the best interest of the users.

Ignoring the strengths & weaknesses of each platform is very bad practice, leading to bland, ugly, harder to use & poorly designed apps.

Also there is subtle lag in yours that isn't present in the native app.

[michaelchaize]

@BakaRakuda Hi and thanks for your comment. The point is not "being lazy" but "being productive". I'm not saying that Flex will replace native apps, but that it will make sense in some cases. Imagine a large organization who already has Flex developers and that needs to deploy a CRM client on multiple devices (desktop, android, blackberry playbook, iOS...)... they can easily reuse their exiting skills to quickly enable a descent experience on mobile and tablet devices.

[martypitt]

@BakaRakuda I don't think that comparing UX design is really the point of this video. It's more a commentary of performance. Earlier builds of Flex based apps on iOS devices was extremely poor. This video shows that cross-compiled apps on iOS have come a long way, and are now very much a reality.

Modifying the alginment of tiles and the location of the back button etc., is up to the developer. (And, FWIW, I agree with you that these elements should follow the platforms conventions)

[PlantaButterfly]

@BakaRakuda

Cross platform is good to developer, only if you are not developer.

Of coz, if you are the developer, you can have some adjustment for each platform to fit the style of each platform, only if you are an idiot developer....

[neuronist]

@BakaRakuda

hmm - back button right is someone doing it wrong. it is not something you HAVE to do in flex. you can easily change that to work AND look exactly like on the iphone with no work at all. furthermore you can have more skins.

ignoring the strength of reusing code, of optimizing one line of code, of giving the user a rich, well thought and well tested experience is very bad practice.

[wiibart]

Can I embed external libraries like box2d, and what would the framerate be?

[MatthewFabb]

@BakaRakuda The UI is very basic as Adobe is likely just demoing the performance here. A developer can skin the app to look any way they want.

One big advantage of using Flex or say PhoneGap or other cross platform tools, is not about being lazy but being able to create cross-platform apps on a budget. Creating native apps on multiple platforms can get very expensive. Cross platform tools allow companies to get an app on a large number of platforms for a wider reach of users.

[vins38]

useless ;)

[oldn00bster]

Can you tell us when we'll be able to try a beta for flex5? And can you also tell us if we'll have a better method of debugging and deploying apps on iOS then the current one using the Packager for iPhone?

Thanks!