What makes the app big news? "There isn't a single line of code I had to change to get this app to run on all these different operating systems and devices," said creator and Adobe product manager Christian Cantrell.
Multi-platform applications designed to run on a variety of operating systems, Internet browsers and mobile devices are typically a pain to code -- so painful that it generally prevents game and app developers from releasing products on more than one platform at a time. For example, there are many more apps available for the iPhone than the Android because developers must rewrite significant portions of code to create functional apps for both platforms. It also doesn't help that native apps for different operating systems are written in several different programming languages; iPhone developers have to work in Objective-C, while BlackBerry and Android developers must write their programs in Java.
In short, most apps are engineered to be mutually incompatible with multiple platforms. That's why Cantrell's iReverse is such a game-changer.
In this video, Cantrell shows the game running natively on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. He also demos the app on an iPod touch, a Droid and yes, an iPad. Finally, we see iReverse running in a Chrome web browser.
As he explains in the video, Cantrell used Flash Builder and ActionScript to create "platform-specific wrappers" for different devices without having to rewrite the app's code base for each operating system. "It's a little bit tricky, but I'm going to open-source the iReverse application so everyone can see the code." Stay tuned to Cantrell's blog for documentation and details.