A few days ago, as many developers, I got the following message from Apple.

I think it is a good step towards developers. A small one, but towards. The feed, publicly available, includes tips about submission and general news. For example, iTunes connect will be down from Dec 23rd to 28th. An encouraging news is that “92% of applications are being approved within 14 days”. Although this is far from the dream of many developers I think it proves positive attitude in cultivating the relationship with the creators of iPhone applications.

In the meantime, acceptance policies are sweetening.

You probably know Adobe is working to enable the development of iPhone applications on the Flash IDE. Yep, your imagination is correct: open Flash, write actionscript code, follow some step and end up with an iPhone application. The feature has been announced during the last Adobe Max conference. The great evangelist Lee Brimelow realized a video that illustrates how you can build iPhone applications through Flash CS5, which will be available as a beta by the end of the year. Though still limited (e.g. you don’t have a real simulator) the idea looks promising. I will continue to develop iPhone applications the “old way” but I’ll stay tuned for new developments on CS5. If you didn’t watch the video yet, go!

After six months of iPhone these are my reflections, in the form of “The iPhone is a …”

Time saver

The only thing to complete your daily todo list is to wait for an email and redirect it to someonelse? Go to the beach, play volley and in the pause between one set and the other check the email and reply/redirect accordingly.

Angryness preventer

You have to go to pick your girlfriend up. You’d really like to check some more news or finish reading a blog post, but you agreed to be at her place at 9 pm. You are on time, she is late. With no iPhone you’d probably feel angry. Grab your iphone out of the pocket and finish checking news. Stumbled upon something interesting? Use Read It Later.

Boredom preventer

Bored to wait at the bus stop? Nobody to talk to and the bus is late? Open one of the tons of applications and play with it. Side effect: might loose the bus.

Good guide

Looking for a bank around you? a bar? Open up Around Me and find what you need.
Got lost. Open the Maps application and follow the path to get to your destination.

Cool to program

Tired of virtual machined/garbage collected languages? Looking for some new development platform to expand your knowledge and your business? Have a look at the iPhone. I bought it because of development purposed (top secret at the moment) and I ended up with the iPhone as my daily technological companion. There is plenty of tutorials, books, forums and open source code to learn from.

Probably everything I described above can be experienced with some other 3G enabled phone, except the cool-to-programness, which is what I appreciate mostly at the moment.

Flash running on the android platform? Yes. Flash was already been demonstrated as running on android. Now Bsquare has been charged to make the porting of the flash technology to the android platform. I started the study of the iphone sdk a while ago, and so did many flexers/actionscripters. But this news makes me mumble. I like learning new languages/frameworks a priori but I probably will have to set a preference: android or iphone?

I have set up a poll here. State your opinion!

I started developing in Flash, doing websites. I then moved to Flash mobile (before the introduction of flite) and developed a mobile guide for a research project. When Flex was presented I didn’t dive into it, because I was busy with other projects and languages. When Adobe Air (introduced as Apollo) was released I started experimenting again. When I heard of the iphone I thought: “This is the platform of the future!”. But I felt disappointed when Steve confessed he didn’t like Flash on the iphone. Now I am simply thinking:

• isn’t iphone running Safari? Yes
• isn’t Safari based on webkit? Yes
• aren’t Adobe Air application partly running on webkit? Yes, if developed in javascript/html.

So? I think it is not far the moment that ad Adobe Air application will run on the iPhone.

What a great news! Looks like Adobe is already implementing a flash player for the iphone. I was having a look at the iPhone sdk and was fascinated by its features. But this is a good news. Steve was lamenting there is a gap between the Flash player and its lite version. Let’s hope the gap will be filled soon! I was tempted to port Posty to the iphone. Maybe I don’t need to to that and I can focus on new features.  
Update: check here and here.