As a developer, I love Adobe. As a user, I love Apple. So, the recent clash of these two companies was a very personal, internal struggle for me. When Adobe announced that CS5 would include the ability to publish iOS applications from Flash, I was ecstatic. After the ensuing battle had subsided with Apple’s failure to block Adobe, I was still happy—but the storm left me weary and worried. Despite my concerns, I got to work straightaway and started testing.

At first, my concerns (and the naysayers) were validated. I built a simple test app that “tweened” two fullscreen images back and forth with the swipe gesture. I loaded it onto the iPad and almost cried at the results. The performance was less than great, the swipe gesture was not being recognized very quickly, and the tween was not smooth at all. I was crushed, but I pushed through and kept testing. As I did, my spirits rose as I found that everything else was going quite smoothly.

Here are some lessons I learned along the way:

• Clean, class-based AS3 produces fast, well-performing iOS apps
• Embedded video plays smoothly when exported to FLV at a low bitrate
• Audio syncs best when the frame rate of the FLV matches that of the FLA
• Bitmaps don’t tween very well (yet)—even when using tweenlite and “cache as bitmap”
• Gesture recognition works, but not very well (yet)—even when using gestureworks
• The accelerometer responds well
• The iPad keyboard works well with text input boxes
• External web links and email links work well
• Standard mouse CLICK events respond quickly

So, excluding tween animations and gestures (for now), the overall performance was impressive, and I remain hopefully optimistic that these issues will continue to improve. In my experience, battery life, crashing, and other so-called downfalls cited by Apple have not been a problem. It seems that with a well-optimized and well-built Flash file, the resulting application performs well on the iPad.

For me, the flexibility and speed of working in ActionScript far outweigh the supposed shortcomings, not to mention the enormous benefit of deploying to all devices from one working file. That is to say, the fact that Flash can now allow developers like me to build an app once and deploy it for all types of devices is a game changer.

For now, for me, Flash is proving a viable option for mobile app development.

Jordan Richardson is the Director of Interactive Content at DevicePharm, a marketing strategy and integrated marketing communications firm based in Irvine, CA. You can email Jordan at jordanr@DevicePharm.com.