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.

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 =)

Back in November 2005 (yes, 2.5 years ago!) I wrote an article about how data types and type checking work in ActionScript. ActionScript is different than many languages, in that the ActionScript compiler can be used for compile-time type checking (or not), and at runtime it is a strongly typed language, but it also has features of dynamically typed languages. This allows for some flexibility but also means that you have to be careful about testing your code (because the compiler won’t always catch everything).

My conclusion (not original by any means) was that unit testing is an important tool for ActionScript developers. I’ve tried a couple of ActionScript unit testing frameworks (ASUnit and FlexUnit). And finally getting to the point of this post, I was interested to learn today that the crew at Digital Primates is releasing an open source unit testing framework for Flex, known as “dpunit”.

(via Jesse Warden via Twitter)

A couple of months ago at a SilvaFUG meeting I saw a demo of some graph visualization libraries — the kind of thing you use to create a graph showing nodes linked together according to various relationships.

The current “favorite” is the Flex Visual Graph Library (FVGL) Open Source Project.

Their Visual Graph explorer sample gives a nice overview of the functionality that’s available.

Anyway, I forgot to note this earlier, so I’m adding it now, though there’s a good chance this isn’t news to anyone who’s interested in this sort of thing.

(via email from Ted Patrick)

A co-worker and friend of mine, Francis Cheng, recently started a new blog that I wanted to share:

http://blogs.adobe.com/fcheng/

Francis is a former engineer on the Flash Authoring team (and before that, a lawyer). He’s been in his current position on the ActionScript documentation team for several years. He’s also one of Adobe’s representatives on the ECMAScript language committee, so he’s got a better idea than anyone else I know of the internals and future of the core ActionScript language.

So far his posts have been really great if, like me, you’re interested in knowing more about the less-used features of ActionScript and also getting an early look at new features that will probably be in future versions of ActionScript.