Flash Apps for iPhone announced!

Amongst other exciting announcements at the Adobe Max conference they’ve just announced Flash Apps for iPhone!

This is absolutely awesome news – ActionScript programmers can create apps for the iPhone. There’s more information here.

A few questions spring to mind:

• What will performance be like?
• Can we take advantage of all the hardware, such as accelerometers, GPS, etc?
• When can I get my hands on it!?

For a while I’d been saying this was the most logical thing for Adobe to do, but I never thought they’d actually do it..

Yey!

[UPDATE]

Funnily enough, all my questions are answered in the Developer FAQ!

Performance:

The iPhone and iPod touch have processors significantly slower than those found on most desktop PCs and Macs. Thus, content may run slower than it does when running on a desktop personal computer. However, the exact differences will depend on the specific content.

In addition, the hardware specifications vary greatly between different versions of the iPhone and iPod touch. Because of this, it is important that you test your content early and often across all devices which you plan to target.

The hardware that’s supported:

• MultiTouch
• Screen Orientation
• Saving images to Photo Library
• Accelerometer
• Geo-location
• Cut / Copy / Paste

Additionally, we can take advantage of OpenGL ES. This could be extremely important for games!

In order to make development of high-performance applications easier, applications built for the iPhone also can take advantage of an augmented rendering pipeline that uses OpenGL ES. This augmented rendering pipeline enhances the Flash rendering model to allow developers to take advantage of the GPU on iPhones. By enabling this rendering path, you have the ability to modify your display objects to put them on a hardware surface

Flash suddenly got a lot more exciting.