Lots of news and rumors are flying around right now about developing iPhone apps using Flash Platform tools. Here’s a collection of links that I’ve found, some the official information and some information from folks who were involved in developing this cool new technology:

• First thing first: if you haven’t seen the MythHackers video about Flash on the iPhone, you must go watch it. I laughed so hard my eyes were watering.
• Aditya Bansod’s ADC article “Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash,” from the Product Manager who’s in charge of the Flash Platform development for iPhone effort. Includes some technicial details on how it actually works and how you build the apps.
• Adobe Labs: Apps for iPhone: Video demo and list of apps that are already in the app store today
• Adobe Labs developer FAQ: this has the most information about what this really means for developers
• Mike Chambers is, as always, a great resource for information on this topic. He has a nice summary blog post, plus I know he’s collecting questions to answer in his MAX session (on Wednesday, I believe).
• Arno Gourdol, engineering manager for Adobe AIR (and huge iPhone fan and former Apple employee) talks briefly about the underlying technology, with a focus on MAX sessions where you can learn more.
• Never one to hold back his enthusiasm, Ted Patrick has posted the source code for three different Flash Platform iPhone apps he wrote, that can be seen on the demo phones in the Adobe booth at MAX. (He says it’s four apps in the blog title, but he explains that two of them are the same app with and without hardware acceleration.)

That’s all for now. I’ll keep updating the list as I find more resources.

Here are a few things that stood out to me the most in this great day at the greatest Flex conference on the planet:

• FlexUnit 4. Wow. Big update. Very nice new features. Time to get (back) into it. (presentation by Michael Labriola)
• Renaun Erickson’s Structured Log Testing framework. Another great, unexpected surprise. I didn’t really have plans to go to this session except that Renaun’s such a smart, friendly guy. And frankly, I’ve never really had enough interest to take a look at his work on this project so far. Boy am I glad I changed my mind. This is definitely a testing approach I can get into — much less overhead than other approaches I’ve seen. Getting going with it is only barely more work than adding trace() calls. And the result is certainly infinitely more valuable.

Considering I didn’t come to Indianapolis with any real interest in hearing more about testing…I’m surprised to find myself so excited by what I saw today. Today is a great day for Flex testing, that’s for sure.

I also got to hear some interesting ideas and future plans from Jacob Wright and Tyler Wright. (They made me a bit jealous — I wish I had a Flex programmer brother that I could see at conferences.) If you’re in Indianapolis, I recommend checking out their “write-in” session on the Flight Framework at 10am Tuesday in the Illinois East room.

Other less code-centric, but interesting, tidbits:

• Joe Berkovitz is an avid mountain biker.
• Ben Stucki has a sweet five-year-old daughter who likes deep-fried calamari and pasta, although she wasn’t able to finish her macaroni and cheese at Buca di Beppo, where apparently even the child meals are sized to feed 3-4 people.

As I’ve mentioned I’ve been doing a lot of AIR database work, so I’ve been spending literally hours a day working in my AIR SQL query runner app. The good news is that means I’ve been finding/fixing bugs and adding features!

One thing I’ve been wishing for the last week or so is undo/redo functionality as I’m editing query text. Coincidentally, I just found out that my 360|Flex friend Jac Wright has written a library for undo and redo in Flash Player (ActionScript) text fields. The previous link is to the Google Code project; here’s his introductory blog post about the “undo textfields” library. (via Tyler Wright via Gilles Guillemin/Twitter)

Admittedly I haven’t tried this yet, and I’ve asked whether it’s been tested in AIR so I don’t know whether it will actually be feasible as-is. But I’ve got my fingers crossed! =)

(or, “why I haven’t written anything new here in a looong time”)

Like so many people, my work goes in cycles (from “busy” to “crazy” to “desperate crunch”). If you’re someone who follows this site (if in fact there is anybody who does), you may have figured out that any time I go for a long time without posting, it means I’m near the end of a project (and consequently, that new documentation is coming soon).

Well, that time has arrived. With the public announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 4, we’re doing something different in terms of the schedule for releasing documentation. This time the documentation has been released ahead of time, before the product actually ships. (Primarily for the sake of search engine indexing — but hey, let’s not complain.)

Of course, a draft version of the Flash Player 10 language reference has been around for a while now, but if you haven’t had a chance to take a look (or if you want to know how things turned out in their final form), you can now view the final Flash CS4 (including ActionScript for Flash Player 10) documentation. Also, this includes several significant additions to the content in Programming ActionScript 3.0, so if you prefer to learn by reading about a topic rather than by piecing things together from the reference, then you’ll find this content useful.

Here are a few top-level links to get you started:

• Programming ActionScript 3.0
• ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components reference
• Using Flash (including what’s new in Flash CS4)

Just for fun, here is the new content that I wrote:

• Vector class (strongly-typed arrays):

  • Vector class in Programming ActionScript 3.0 (new content is interspersed with the previous content on the Array class)
  • Vector class reference

• Pixel Bender (“custom filters” — although it’s a lot more than filters)

  • Working with Pixel Bender shaders (in Programming ActionScript 3.0) - plus other sections that are linked to from there, about using a shader as a drawing fill, a filter, a blend mode, etc.
  • Shader class reference
  • ShaderJob class reference
  • ShaderParameter and ShaderInput class references
  • ShaderFilter class
  • plus new content in the DisplayObject class, the BlendMode class, the Graphics class, etc.

And here are some of the other new topics that I think are the most interesting:

• Working in three dimensions (3D) in Programming ActionScript 3.0
• Inverse Kinematics (IK) in Programming ActionScript 3.0
• Using the new drawing api (aka “drawing api 2”) in Programming ActionScript 3.0

So, what’s next for me? (Thanks for asking!) Since finishing the final versions of the Flash CS4 documentation, I’ve been working on some “quick start” articles around the new features. Those articles will appear in the Flash developer center soon — probably when Flash CS4 actually ships. (I’ve done one on the Vector class and one on the new FileReference functionality for accessing local files without a server round trip. Other colleagues have done cool things with dynamically generating audio and Pixel Bender — so I think it’ll definitely be worth a look.) Along with that, I’m working on new features for the next version of Adobe AIR. I also have a few side projects that I’ve been trying to make progress on as I can sneak in a minute here and there.

Lee Brimelow has just pointed out that the Flash Player 10 documentation is available for download on Adobe Labs. I’m excited that this is public, so I can start talking about it more — I’ve been working on the documentation for several months now =)

On a personal note, the screenshot that Lee posted for the Vector class documentation was written by me. So that was fun to see =)