There are a few posts out there relating to Shantanu’s disclosure of a standalone Flash Player being developed for the iPhone using the newly released SDK, but of course that doesn’t answer the question as to whether people will be able to browse the web and view Flash content in-line, given that Flash makes up a huge chunk of the web, and also provides the revenue for a great many sites through advertisements (fallback GIFs are not what advertisers are paying so much money for).

I’ve been learning Objective-C and the iPhone SDK over the past week and it seems to me there might be an alternative option in using the WebKit engine, available in the SDK. Potentially identifying SWF embeds in web pages and replacing them with a Flash Player control. One thing I’m not clear on is whether this violates the agreement put forth by the SDK. In particular…

“No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s).”

As a side-note, the iPhone SDK is a pretty well made package. If it weren’t for the possible confusion between the various frameworks and component parts that have arisen over the years, Carbon, Cocoa, QuickTime, Core Graphics, Core Animation (Leopard and iPhone/iPodTouch only) it would have been even better. But overall the video tutorials, reams of documentation and samples make learning these things fairly easy when compared with what you might have to go through; considering Objective-C is only a very thin layer on top of C, and for me had a much stranger syntax than C++ (when you assume Java, C#, ActionScript are all strikingly similar).