Are iPhone and Unity3D taking away Flash Developers

I don't know when Jeffry Houser said "Today, iPhone development is the next big thing." but I was saying that 18 months ago. That train has well and truly left the station.

*Today*, Android development is the next big thing - especially since it is getting Flash later in the year.

I wonder if the reason for this developers to turn to Unity3D is just because iPhone is lacking Flash, or is Unity3D indeed the better platform. I think until the iPhone gets a decent running version of the Flash Player this comparison cant be made. But I do worry a lot about of why the iPhone development of the flash player is taking such a long time while other mobile platform with far less cpu power are adapting it so quickly.

It's not taking long, Apple doesn't want it on the iPhone.

flirt.sourceforge.net/


Flirt contains a parser for reading SWF format files, a rasterizer for rendering the vector shapes into bitmaps, and an actionscript engine. Just hook it up to a timer and you've got a player. Interface your system UI events into the hooks provided and it's interactive. Present your application code to the player as actionscript objects and you've got a scriptable, cross-platform UI. Flirt is available under the BSD license, allowing for use in both open source and commercial projects. BSD License. Ported to OS X.




tulrich.com/geekstuff/gameswf.html


gameswf is an open source Public Domain library for parsing and rendering SWF movies, using 3D hardware APIs for rendering. It is designed to be used as a UI library for computer and console games. BSD License. Ported to OS X.




swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/


Swfdec is the library for decoding and rendering Flash animations. It is still in heavy development. The intended audience are developers or people using it for pretested Flash animations (think embedded here). If you use it on unknown content, expect it to have issues and don't be surprised if it crashes. If you encounter such a crash however, make sure to file a bug immediately. LGPL License. No OS X port.



I think it would be easy to port Flirt to the iPhone platform.

And don't forget that iPhone supports SVG + Javascript.

I think you know why C/C++, Java and C# are the most popular languages. Their language structure is very clear and logical. But ActionScript is "mixed-blood". Please refer a method code below:

public function hello(name:String):String{

var helloText:String = "Hello " + name;

return helloText;

}

You're comparing apples and oranges. Flash is great at some things, but it's not a targeted 3D game development engine, which is Unity's target market. People who want to develop games -- and who want to make money off of developing games -- not only can't create games in Flash on the iPhone (because there's no iPhone Flash Player) but can't create true 3D games in Flash at all on any platform. Unity can be used to develop games for both Mac and Windows (now on both Mac and Windows), on the Web with a browser plugin, with export to the iPhone and Wii platforms. In many ways, Unity's similar to the late, lamented Shockwave3D only on steroids and updated for the current millennium.

The bulk of Flash developers aren't going to defect to Unity or the iPhone, but the ones who want to make games are probably going to at least dabble their toes in the water.

Not a better platform as much as better for certain things. I would hate to be building out GUIs in Unity in it's current incarnation.