Adobe says that Apple didn’t help with development, but hopes it will appreciate the effort Adobe put in. Adobe announced this week that it would be releasing a new version of Flash Pro later this year in beta form that will allow devs to export Flash code in a format that will run on the iPhone.

Adobe still wants to offer a Flash player for the iPhone, but it says it needs cooperation form Apple to do so. The developer solution is nothing more than a work around for now. Adobe says that it submitted seven apps to the App store as pre-release of Flash Pro software and all were accepted, which doesn’t mean much sometimes with Apple.

They might be trying to anticipate the resource-heavy of Flash so that it can run well on the iPhone and do many of the things users expect Flash to do.

In an interview with Bloomberg at the Davos, Switzerland event, Adobe chief Shantanu Narayen describes development as a complicated two-way process rather than maintaining the previous image of a one-sided effort that would depend on App Store approval before it could launch.

“It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating,” he says. “The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.”

What hurdles Adobe has to overcome aren’t mentioned by the executive, though the company’s long porting process has underscored the difficulty involved. Narayen had said that he was “pleased with progress” as far back as June of last year — just three months after the iPhone SDK made native third-party apps an option on the touchscreen device.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has maintained since nearly a year ago that the real obstacle is the nature of Flash itself. While desktop Flash is too resource-heavy for the small processor and low memory of smartphones like the iPhone, Jobs has warned that Flash Lite is too feature-limited and doesn’t do many of the things users expect Flash to do — such as playing video on the web or showing complex animations on websites.

[via Apple Insider | image credit]

That is what the site looks like under iPhone firmware 1.1.4, a flat map with no Flash, and no variations. It is clearly very different from the screen shot of a normal desktop web browser, loading the site up, with full Flash support.

As you can see in this screen shot from a desktop, the map is a little fancier. It has color variations, and also hover effects and mouse over actions.

Lastly, this is how it looks on the iPhone 3G. Well, this is how it might look. Clearly the device shows a full version of the page in the browser, but this is almost certainly marketing material. Meaning screen rendering, and this could be an oversight by Apple. On the more exciting side, Apple could have thrown in Flash support and waited for someone to catch on to this little detail, you decide.

[Via iPhone Atlas]

“Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone. However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone Web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it” Adobe statement 

The key frustrations seem to be the ban on background processes, where Apple is insisting that third-party software must exit once a user switches to another app and cannot continue running in the background, and the inability to develop plugins for Safari on the iPhone.  While Adobe could likely still create a standalone Flash client, similar in functionality to the existing YouTube player on the cellphone, this would not give the same experience of Flash as on a desktop computer, where content is embedded into the webpage.

It remains to be seen whether Apple will work with Adobe and grant them dispensation, above and beyond the current terms of the SDK, to develop a plugin for Safari that would satisfy Steve Jobs’ criticism of the current Flash software.

[via PHONE Magazine]

“We believe Flash is synonymous with the Internet experience, and we are committed to bringing Flash to the iPhone. We have evaluated [the iPhone SDK] and we think we can develop an iPhone Flash player ourselves”Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe

Jobs’ primary criticism was the “missing product in the middle” of Adobe’s range, in-between the basic Flash player for mobile devices (which isn’t apparently good enough for the iPhone) and the bulky full version. Currently Apple are insisting that third-party software run as standalone apps that shut down as soon as the program is exited (rather than running in the background); it’s uncertain whether Adobe, once Apple approve their Flash offering, will get some degree of dispensation from these guidelines and even be allowed to link into Safari on the iPhone.

Microsoft’s Silverlight developers are also working on bringing the Flash-alternative to the iPhone using the official SDK; however Steve Ballmer has expressed concern about the potential royalties for any actual release.

[Via Adobe working on iPhone Flash player after Jobs rebuke - PHONE Magazine]