With the day 1 keynote wrapping up, Adobe MAX 2009 has now officially started. While most of the announcements in today’s keynote were already sent out last night, the biggest announcement was probably a very big surprise to many. The first time I heard this news a few weeks ago, I nearly fell off my chair and I’ve been dying to tell you guys about it ever since.

To come back to the title of this post, it really is a great time to be a Flash Platform developer. Without having to learn anything new (with the exception of some new APIs), you can now leverage your skills to create applications that not only run in the browser and on the desktop but also on millions of devices already in the market today. The Flash Platform gives you the broadest possible reach for your applications.

I’m sure you know that we’ve been talking about bringing Flash Player 10 to mobile devices and I think after today you’ll agree that we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve been working very hard with our Open Screen Project partners to optimize Flash Player to run on a variety of smart phones. Flash Player 10.1 (the first runtime release of the Open Screen Project) will be available for a broad range of mobile devices, including smartphones, netbooks and other Internet-connected devices, allowing your content to reach your customers wherever they are. Check out these demonstration videos to see Flash Player in action on a Palm Pre and a Windows Mobile device.

The biggest announcement of the day was without a doubt the work we’ve done for the iPhone. In the not too distant future you will be able to build applications for iPhone with Flash CS5 Professional. Those applications can be distributed through Apple’s App Store. A public beta version of Flash CS5 Professional with this new capability is planned for later this year. This new capability in Flash CS5 Professional allows developers to use their preferred Flash Platform tools and technologies to develop content for a device that was previously closed to them. Because the source code and assets are reusable for applications that run on Flash Platform runtimes, Adobe AIR and Flash Player, it allows them to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments. If you’d like to test the performance on your iPhone, feel free to download any of the Flash based apps that are currently already available in Apple’s App Store. For more information go to http://adobe.com/go/iphone.

For an overview of other news released at MAX, check out Ryan Stewart’s rundown of the MAX news.

Flash on!