Is there a sneaky way to get swf behavior on an iPad via Adobe Flex IOS packager

Question

I build Flex applications. One of them shows slides. They're swf's loaded dynamically from a remote server at run-time. My slides are both re-sizable by the end user and animated.

This is easy on the PC with all the Flash support. For the iPad I use the Adobe Flex IOS packager. Pretty cool. Gets me just about everything I need - except swf's dynamically loaded at run-time. Apple's terms of service do not support it.

So I'm relegated to flattening slides into static images which don't scale well when users re-size them and obviously don't show animations.

If I built a native IOS app with XCode I could probably achieve this with KeyNote or something alike. Can't do it though. Don't have the time or resources.

Has anyone knowledge of a sneaky way to achieve this aesthetic via the Flex IOS packager? Is there some inventive way to sneak swf's in or use another image format like animated gif's or something else I'm not thinking of that might scale well?

Answer 1

You can import swfs at runtime with frame labels. Your shell swf can then tell the loaded slide what to do based on the labels such as stop() or even adding listeners.

Answer 2

If you don't mind pre-compiling, you can compile all your SWFs into SWCs and load them dynamically, locally from your app. iOS should allow this in their TOS since the SWCs are basically a library of symbols / classes that you can then instantiate.

Here's a great tutorial on it, that pretty much is the workaround you're looking for.

If you still need to load SWFs (via a webservice, or some other outside source), then note that the technicality and "spirit" of the iOS Guideline against the loading of swfs is loading EXECUTABLE content, that can be interpreted and run at runtime (i.e. anything that could have actionscript within it).

The way around this is to only load swf's that have no Actionscript in them. "...files that contain only images, static text and embedded fonts are permissable..." (from this thread discusses this: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4004457)