So while this is extremely exciting (as in, I just became an iPhone developer in 5 minutes this morning exciting) there are a few things to note:

1. This is only for standalone applications - meaning iPhone/iPod Touch applications that you download from Apple's App Store either on your phone or via iTunes. It does not include Flash played via the Safari mobile web browser. So no online Flash video just yet. Ryan Stewart, an Adobe Platform Evangelist tweeted the following today during the keynote: "When Apple is ready to bring the full Web browsing experience to iPhone users, we'll be ready to bring Flash Player to Safari."

2. You cannot load external SWFs into the apps you compile for the iPhone. The official line on this is: "iPhone applications built with Flash Platform tools are compiled into standard, native iPhone executable packages and there is no runtime interpreter that could be used to run ActionScript bytecode within the application." But in reality, Adobe is just staying within the limits imposed by Apple and their "no running other bytecode in apps" rule.

3. This won't be available until Flash CS5 is released. The good news here is that a public beta of Flash CS5 will be released before the end of 2009.

You can read all about this announcement over on Adobe Labs: Flash Professional CS5 Applications for iPhone, at the official Adobe press release, and in the Adobe Dev Center where they have posted an article about Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash. The Dev Center article goes into some good technical explanation of what is going on behind the scenes.

There is also an extensive technical FAQ available on Adobe Labs which is worth the read.

Lastly, you can see some quick video of the Mythbusters-type segment they did as the announcement below:

The app includes class references for Adobe AIR 1.5, Adobe Flex 3.2 and Flash Player 10. I've been testing it this weekend and it has run great.

There is more information on Mike's website for the app, including a download link for the iTunes App Store. If you want to install the app directly on your phone, you'll need to search for "Mike Chambers" to find the app while it works its way into the App Store search.

Worth the read, if nothing else, to help guide you through the hype to what the real story is...

Update: Bill Perry, also from Adobe, has also posted an even a more detailed account of the facts on his Flash Devices blog.

QuickLook Plugins List is a directory of Quick Look Plugins for Apple’s OS X 10.5 Leopard. If you are unfamiliar with Quick Look in OS X 10.5, you can read more about it here. Basically, Quick Look in Mac OS X Leopard lets you play, view, and page through your files without opening them. And this new site aims to keep a directory of plugins that developers have written for this new technology, allowing you to use this feature with a much greater set of file types such as ZIP, XML, FLV and more.

This all started from a blog post Keith Peters did last month when he mentioned ColorXML which adds color formatting to XML files in Quick Look. I did some research and found several plugins, but they were all scattered around the internet on various blogs and forum postings. Hopefully this new site will help to avoid that scavenger hunt.

If you see that any are missing on the site, I encourage you to use the contact form and send them along. Also, you can help the site out by 'Digging' it on Digg.

Enjoy!

* A new version of FMS is upcoming and will support the new file format. This is powerful stuff. Simply drop video files you might have encoded using one of the countless tools out there onto the server and it'll stream.

Based on the rest of Tinic's post (it is a long and somewhat technical read), it looks like Adobe will be transitioning away from the FLV format due to some technical limitations. But, I'm wondering if the change will enable some sort of rights management -- even though the post says the Flash Player will not support FairPlay protected videos, there are plenty of other rights management systems out there. Rights management is a very commonly requested feature by sites like ABC.com and others who used to stream all their video in Flash.

Lastly, now that YouTube has been encoding all their video into a Quicktime-playable format (for the iPhone and AppleTV) as well as FLV, I'm wondering when/if they will switch over to only H.264 encoding with Flash Player delivery. This is a win-win for Adobe and Apple: the Flash Player will remain the delivery method of choice due to its massive install base, and H.264/Quicktime formats have just made a comeback as the encoding choice for web delivery.

Update: Ryan Stewart answers some common questions about this update, and Aral Balkan has a very detailed FAQ on his blog. I also adjusted the title to be more technically correct, as Apple didn't invent the H.264 codec, just enables Quicktime to play the specific codec format.

I suppose the case could be made that interactive designers and developers have had to create for three browsers ever since Safari for OS X was released, but the market share of Safari (and those users who use Safari over Firefox on their Macs) was quite small. By introducing this to the Windows market, the task of testing on every browser becomes a growing problem, not a shrinking one.

So be sure to download and install the public beta of Safari 3 from Apple's website (http://www.apple.com/safari/), as you'll need to add Safari for Windows to your CSS and JavaScript testing suite.

Some times Flash's ability to run identically across all browsers on any platform just makes it shine even more. Today's Safari announcement makes the decision to develop for the Flash Platform that much easier.

Update: Todd Dominey and Shaun Inmann both weigh in on the issue with some good points:

Todd: "Speaking of web development, the release of Safari for Windows is fantastic news. Finally, Windows developers will be able to preview/test their work in Safari, without owning a Mac, and have a pretty accurate (if not identical) representation of what Mac users will see."

Shaun: "It took me quite a while to get onboard with Safari when it was originally released for OS X: the prospect of having yet another browser to debug didn’t endear Apple to many developers. But Safari on Windows is another story entirely.

Assuming the rendering engine is consistent (I wonder how it will handle anti-aliasing) this is a huge windfall for Safari users on the Mac because even moderate adoption on the PC means more attention payed to the rendering engine’s quirks which will result in a better experience for all."

For more information, check out Ben's post on the panel, or download it here.

[Updated to reflect updated version of the panel, released June 7th, 2007]

New features in 3.0 include:

+ SmartSelect -- set your preferred application handlers cross-platform. Want to open URLs in IE7, mailto: links in Mail.app, or .xls files in Excel 2007? You can now.
+ 3D acceleration -- DirectX and OpenGL support will allow 3D gamers to play Windows games in their full glory
+ Snapshot -- back up your virtual machine easily and roll back at any time
+ Parallels Explorer -- copy files into or out of your virtual disk images or your Boot Camp partition without needing to start or load the Parallels VM
+ Enhanced Boot Camp support, better USB, better printer sharing, Coherence 2.0

Since they are offering a nice pre-order discount ($39 until June 6), I placed my order this morning. Although the actual application is not available just yet, I received a new serial number right away and the email receipt said "Delivery no later than June 3rd" -- all of which makes me believe version 3.0 will be available before next week.

Overall the process is actually fairly simple - the artwork gets loaded into CorelDraw (oh how we were missing Illustrator) and then you print the design just like any other document. The printer driver allows you to select the settings for the laser engraver such as power, resolution, and dithering modes. After a test run on paper to ensure everything was lined up properly, we etched directly onto the laptop.

The hardest part was picking out and customizing the artwork. It is permanent, and as such the task of choosing artwork made me feel like I was getting a tattoo. Because I earn my living as a Flash Developer and I spend much of my day working on my laptop, the design had to be something I was sure would stand the test of time. For that reason I decided to choose something that had a retro feel, but also a bit organic and edgy. I think that was accomplished with this design, and once the process was finished I felt I had chosen correctly.

A big thanks to Joe at Engrave here in Portland, Oregon for spending a few hours helping me get everything perfect. Joe posted a few photos we took (including the two above) to his Flickr account last night, and the design is already getting some great feedback.

Update: Here's a short video I shot with my small Canon Powershot last night of the laser in action:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.jonnymac.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/engraving_video.swf" height="340" width="400" /]

Update 2: Looks like someone posted this to Digg! Also, I've gotten a few emails asking about the artwork. It is an illustration I found on iStockPhoto, which I then put a few hours into customizing. So yes, it is unique, but you can find a similar illustration on iStockPhoto.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a hilarious post about someone who changed every icon in their OSX doc to match the Adobe CS3 branded icons. A full photo can be found here, and the article (which has some guesses at which icons are for which programs) is located here.

For more background on the subject of Adobe's CS3 icons, be sure to check out my prior post.