Flash on the iPhone, in demo form
has finally made its way to the iPhone, with the help of some sneaky developers. The open source Gordon project, hosted over at github, has provided a JavaScript-powered Flash runtime. With it, you can actually load and view Flash's .swf files, even on the iPhone's Mobile Safari browser. I gave it a try earlier today and was delighted to find that several Flash demos ran fine on my 3GS, no jailbreaking or other installation necessary.
Admittedly, this is a very preliminary build, that supports just these SWF tags. Also, to make this work, Flash developers will need to encapsulate the SWF into an HTML wrapper, importing the Gordon JavaScript source and then loading the swf, as shown here. I am not a Flash expert by any means, but this seems like a pretty cool development for any iPhone enthusiasts who would be interested in seeing the platform support that technology. At this point, there's not much to show for it besides a few demos (and who knows what Apple will think about this), but at least there's a currently viable way to run and view Flash on the iPhone.
Thanks, August Joki. And yes, the project name is apparently a riff on Flash Gordon
