Adobe's iPhone Hail Mary

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the move to port Flash to the iPhone isn't a last-ditch effort on Adobe's part to remain relevant in the quickly evolving smartphone market. By allowing developers to compile existing Flash apps into native binaries, Adobe believes it has found a way around Apple's requirements that no non-Apple API interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an app, a clause that has also prevented Sun from porting JVM to the iPhone. The resulting apps will be completely stand-alone, with no runtimes and no Flash Player required mdash; if Apple lets Adobe get away with it, no small feat given how protective Apple has been about its app market. But as much as Apple has at stake here, Adobe may actually have more, McAllister writes. 'Already the idea of using Web languages and tools to build smartphone applications is taking hold. Palm has built an entire smartphone platform around the idea. Apple supports the use of Web technologies like AJAX to build applications based on the iPhone's Safari browser. And developers will soon even be able to build Web-based applications for BlackBerry handsets, thanks to a new SDK from Research in Motion. As late to the game as it is, what Adobe needs now is to convince developers that Flash is better than the other options mdash; and that could be a tough sell.'"pa href="http://apple.slashdot.org/story/09/10/10/0447231/Adobes-iPhone-Hail-Mary?from=rss"img src="http://developers.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/10/10/0447231"/a/ppa href="http://apple.slashdot.org/story/09/10/10/0447231/Adobes-iPhone-Hail-Mary?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mdocnqUKzrMM0UPlpchS4Oi8hSE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mdocnqUKzrMM0UPlpchS4Oi8hSE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mdocnqUKzrMM0UPlpchS4Oi8hSE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/mdocnqUKzrMM0UPlpchS4Oi8hSE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/fDs3fTn1lOY" height="1" width="1"/

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