[2015 update: I think it’s safe to say that Flash is rapidly dying. Don’t go there. Gotta say though, during its brief moment to shine, Flex was actually a really lovely datavis technique.]
I’m interested in developing for the iPad and iPhone, but I’d prefer not to learn Apple’s whole development stack (and good golly, I sure don’t want to go back to manual memory management). Oh, sure, I could learn it, but I don’t have that level of commitment to the environment at this point. I’ve got professional experience with Flex already, so I’m intrigued by Adobe’s move to make Flash/Flex compile to the iPhone and iPad. My question is: how promising of a development path will Adobe’s Slider be? Are we likely to see Slider publicly available in a reasonable timeframe (Adobe: “An early mobile branch of the Flex framework is expected to be available in 2010”)? Are we likely to see reasonable performance? Are there development hurdles that haven’t become clear yet? Heck, is it all just vaporware? There’s pretty limited information available so far, as far as I’ve seen, but I’m interested in people’s predictions, even if they’re speculative.
Adobe’s cross-compilation tech is not vaporware (for Flash, anyways– haven’t seen as much re: Flex). And they would be unlikely to invest so much in it if they thought it would get torpedoed on day one. That said, you must draw your own conclusions about your long-term reliance on it, and your interest in building on a non-native toolchain, both in terms of what you can get out of the environment, and the support channels you’ll need to use (e.g. not Apple) when stuff doesn’t work.
Some people seem to be successfully using Mono touch, which shares (some) similarities.