With Flash Professional CS5, we can now build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store. A public beta of Flash Professional CS5 with prerelease support for building applications for iPhone is planned for later this year. At MAX 2009, Adobe showed a number of applications and games for iPhone that have been built using a prerelease version of Flash Professional CS5. The tooling update allows developers to use Flash technologies to develop content for iPhone and iPod touch. Developers can write new code or reuse existing web content to build applications for iPhone. Because the source code and assets are reusable across the Flash Platform runtimes,—Adobe AIR and Flash Player—it also gives developers a way to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments.

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HTC will be the first mobile company to bring Adobe Flash Player Lite to the Android Open Source Mobile platform with the release of its new Hero mobile device. The HTC Hero phone will come with Flash Lite 3.1, which means it’ll be able to cope with anything written with ActionScript 2.0 and thus be very well equipped for interactive content as well as streaming online video and audio. Checkout a demo video here:-

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/devices/articles/htchero.html

Adobe Flash Builder 4

Adobe has officially announced  re-branding of Flex Builder  to Flash Builder.  Naturally, this change has caused quite a stir among the Flex developer community. The announcement has been received with mixed emotions. I had a feeling that would be the case, considering people involved in Flex development are generally application developers and the word ‘Flash’  does well with designers. In the early days there was a pretty solid line between people working Flex and people doing Flash.  Now Adobe might want to remove this separation to some extent (atleast in the name to begin with) and get both the Flash and Flex community together to further the usage of Flash Player as an application development platform.

Adobe Flash Platform

Adobe is renaming the next version of Flex Builder to Flash Builder 4, it will still be the same Eclipse-based IDE with lots of exciting new features. Adobe is  not renaming the open source Flex Framework or the free Flex SDK.  Adobe will also continue to promote the use of the Flex Framework and Flex development in general.

Also this move to the Flash Builder brand marks the separation between the Flex Framework and the IDE built on Eclipse that can be used for the development of ActionScript as well as Flex projects.

An another interesting development with regard to getting Flash and Flex developer community closer is arrival of Thermo, which basically lets the designers do some part of application development without bothering much about coding.

Adobe is also conducting a pre-release demo of Flash Builder 4 at different locations of the globe. In Bangalore it is slated to be on June 3rd. So if you want to find out more about the upcoming beta releases of  Flash Builder, this would be a great place to start.