While Apple's iPhone has notably been left out of Adobe's new initiative with Flash Player 10.1 to bring an integrated Flash experience to browsers on smartphones and other platforms, TechCrunch notes that Adobe has also been using its Adobe MAX 2009 conference to show off capabilities found in the company's forthcoming Flash Professional CS5 that will allow developers to build Flash-based applications and then export them to the standard .ipa format used for native iPhone applications.
The new support for iPhone applications in the Flash Platform tooling will not allow iPhone users to browse web content built with Flash technology on iPhone, but it may allow developers to repackage existing web content as applications for iPhone if they choose to do so.
Flash Player uses a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine within a browser plug-in to play back content on websites. Those technologies are not allowed on the iPhone at this time, so a Flash Player for iPhone is not being made available today.
Flash Professional CS5 will enable developers to build applications for iPhone that are installed as native applications. Users will be able to access the apps after downloading them from Apple's App Store and installing them on iPhone or iPod touch
Applications created using Flash Professional CS5 meet all iPhone .ipa and SDK requirements, allowing them to be included in Apple's App Store via the standard iPhone Developer Program. Adobe has even featured seven current App Store applications that were built using a pre-release version of Flash Professional CS5.
