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Flash iPhone Apps and the iPad

If you were anywhere near tech news today, you probably noticed Apple announced the iPad. I don’t fully get it, but hey — they’re Apple and they’ll probably sell a few million of them.

The cool thing for iPhone developers is that their iPhone apps run out of the box on the iPad. The iPad is 1024×768 device that runs an “Apple A4” processor. What this means to iPhone developers is their UIs will be by default upscaled by 2x from their native 480×320 to 960×640. I’m going to assume there will be some unused areas of the screen since the aspect ratios don’t match up between the two devices.

The processor, an Apple A4 is a new beast that has no mention prior. I’m going to venture a guess here that it’s an ARM core, probably Cortex A8 or Cortex A9, built with some of the IP they acquired from P.A. Semi.

Since they’re running iPhone / iPod touch apps which are ARM binaries, it’s unlikely they’re running an emulation layer of any sort, and just running the apps straight on the A4 core.

What does this mean for Flash app built with the Packager for iPhone? It means more devices and faster processors! We’ll be working to ensure that our packager works to enable developers to target the new iPad device. Even today, apps that are already in the App Store built with the Flash Platform should be supported.

My colleague Michael Chou has posted additional information on the Flash Platform blog. Also, Christian Cantrell has posted a great article on authoring for multiple screen sizes that went live today.