ObjectiveC on the iPhone: Flash, but faster?
A few months ago I started playing with XCode and the iPhone development environment. I plunked down the $99 fee to join Apple’s development program.
Guess what.
The very same classes we see in flash — Graphics, BitmapData, BlurFilter — are mirrored by Quartz 2D and the Foundation classes of the iPhone. Its not exactly a perfect match, but the algorithms, data structures, and graphics pipeline are quite close. That’s exciting news for hardcore Flash developers! iPhone also gives us OpenGL for some truly amazing effects on a tiny device (e.g. Koi Pond).
I’ll start posting my adventures here in moving from Flash and widgets to iPhone development. Already my iPhone 3.0 is running with a number of experiments. To me, the iPhone is just like hardcore Flash. Except its a lot faster, and potentially more lucrative.
You might be interested to know that the newer iPhone 3G S supports OpenGL ES 2.0.
http://www.slashgear.com/iphone-3g-s-opengl-es-20-support-prompts-app-store-split-concerns-1046565/
Shader support… but smaller market (until more ppl get the new hardware).
I like how 3G S shaders use callback functions, applying a function across the entire bitmap. This seems so much more powerful than the parametric default shaders of flash (e.g. blurs, convolution matrices).
The documentation I’ve found so far doesn’t talk much about accessing the GPU, beyond the higher level OpenGL abstractions. Flash likes to use a separate shader compiler, imitating access to the GPU by shoving instructions through a pipelined (and optionally multi-core) CPU. If you find more info I’d love to see the URL!