Its been a long time coming, but Flash has finally made it onto the iPhone – in the form of, wait for it – standalone applications. For reasons beyond us (obviously not technical), there is still no Flash Plugin runtime for the iPhone version of Safari. Nevertheless this is good news for Flash developers as it provides new opportunities developing for an established platform.

Some sample applications are already on the App Store, made with an pre-release version of Flash CS5, which exports/converts Flash projects into “native” iPhone apps. It will be interesting to see how these perform as traditionally anything built with Flash is quite resource hungry (compared to truly native applications) .

Flash xml editor (version 2) is essentially a pretty, client friendly interface for editing xml files online. It does this quite brilliantly with raw & wysiwg code editing, image, video & sound previews and even a tool for cropping images. As well as editing existing xml files you can add new xml files, so its easy to create truly dynamic Flash web sites.

The killer feature is the simplicity of the integration. Any xml file put into the main “xml” folder becomes editable. This means you can add an easy to use cms to any xml driven site in a matter of minutes.

The only fault we found, is that a lot of the important options are hidden in right click context menu’s. This is not a major problem as full source code is provided so you can customize the interface to you liking (and branding).

Flash xml editor v2 is available to buy exclusively from Flashden. Prices start from an incredibly reasonable $40 for a single license, with big discounts available for multiple uses.

After nearly a year of development and close communication with the Flash Player team, the latest version of SWFObject is now available for download. More robust and well thought out then ever, the 2.2 milestone cements SWFObject’s place as the only embed method you should be using.

Unfortunately it seems Adobe has still not got the message. While officially giving SWFObject a seal of approval, contrary to early reports its not a option in the publish settings of Flash CS4.