Monday’s keynote was interesting, but if you ask most people that were there to give you a rundown, they’ll probably only be able to tell you one thing: Flash support for the iPhone is finally here. I can confidently say that I am one of those people, but from a general perspective, I found it interesting that it was Adobe’s end-of-keynote, anticipation building, biggest announcement of the conference. The one that got the throne wasn’t the new CFBuilder for ColdFusion development with Eclipse; not the Beta 2 releases of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder/Flex 4 (which were originally supposed to go to full release this MAX and instead got delayed to 2010), or even the announcement of Flash version 10.1. Nope, the big announcement was Flash on the iPhone. Adobe even created a 4-minute video skit to play at MAX as a precursor to the announcement. In case you missed it, here’s what we saw right before finding out the big news:

I had lunch right after the keynote on Monday with several community leaders and people from Adobe. I thought it was interesting that the folks from Adobe were surprised – almost to the point of being appalled – by the fact that none of the community leaders that attended the lunch even cared about the announcement that RIM (i.e. Blackberry) had joined the Open Screen Project and now fully supported Flash. The only thing that was being discussed on the subject of mobile was Flash for the iPhone.

A number of sessions were also included in this year’s MAX session schedule that were focused entirely around developing for the iPhone. I attended one of those sessions, and considering how skeptical I was going into it, I was seriously impressed by what I saw. The graphics acceleration looked incredible, and the 3D objects moved quickly and fluidly around the screen.

Multi-touch with the iPhone's Flash Player was impressively smooth even on a 2nd generation iPod

I was quite impressed by the full-fledged multi-touch capabilities and how smooth and responsive the demonstration Flash applications were to the various gestures. Even graphically intensive applications were impressively responsive to multi-touch and gestures, even on a 2nd-generation iPod (above).

Here’s a video of one of these sessions, entitled “Building Applications for iPhone with Flash Professional CS5″ :

Overall, considering the response and the buzz that this one announcement generated, to say that there are a lot of eager Flash developers ready to learn this new iPhone Flash SDK would be an understatement.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Inside Scoop: Adobe Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 official release
• Adobe Burned Twice After Apple Shuns Flash One More Time
• A few words on the state of current web tech: Apple’s iPhone, the iPad, Adobe Flash, and HTML 5
• Adobe Flash Builder 4: Data-centric Features for PHP (PHPBuilder.com)
• Data-centric Adobe Flash Builder development with the Zend Framework