They we close to releasing the tool last year, but now that iphone is iOS4+, they need to update the tools to handle the new API sets.  I would guess it will not take long. I would also expect they will call back some of the people who helped with the tool although most of them have already moved on.  Will be interesting to see how many they can get back on the project.

Now I’m all excited again to dust off my old flash programming skills and see what I can do with the tool.  Hey ADOBE!  Give me a beta copy!!  Pleeeaasse???

“We are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code,”

This is great news!  Now does it mean we will get ‘save as iOS’ in the Adobe flash dev environment?  There is no work on that right now, but most likely that will happen and the fact that Adobe stock jumped up %12+ I think the odds are pretty good.

We also heard from Anscamobile:

We’ve always argued that our design for Corona was extremely conservative, since Lua scripting to a native C++ engine is a standard architecture in many bestselling iPhone games, including some demonstrated onstage by Apple. Last week’s Apple demo of the Unreal 3D engine on iPhone seemed like an even bigger sign of public approval for game-engine architectures. But now it looks like we can finally put the “section 3.3.1″ question behind us, and focus on talking about what’s great in Corona, rather than parsing Apple technicalities.

– http://blog.anscamobile.com/2010/09/apple-relaxes-all-restrictions-on-ios-developer-tools/

So all you ActionScripters and 3D world creators rejoice.  Life has gotten easier.  And for the consumer, look forward to a whole new wave of cool new apps to choose from.

Now this does not mean flash will be on the iphone or ipad any time soon, or anytime I figure short of going through jailbreak, but the possibility that Flash programmers using AS3 may be able to compile their code to work on the iPhone / iPad.  This would be great news if the rumors come true.  Now how much did Adobe have to do with getting the FTC to look at this issue and move on it we do not know, but this could be a great win for Adobe as well as the tons of ActionScript programmers out there.

Now what are the odds of this actually going through? Actually pretty good.  I never thought the reason for blocking other SDK’s was weak and the business win was pretty limited.  Now that does not mean you still would not have to buy a sdk license, so there are still blocks or at least hurdles Apple can put in the way, but it pain the FTC could cause may not be worth it.  We’ll see, and my fingers are crossed!

Not sure what I’m talking about?  Get the back story here.