Machinarium, iPad Game Built With Adobe Air

Speaking of Flash and tablets, Adobe evangelist Lee Brimelow is proud that the current top-selling paid app for the iPad is Machinarium, a game developed using Adobe Air’s iOS cross-compiler. It’s easy to see why it’s popular — the game looks beautiful.

But at a technical level, is this really something Adobe should be crowing about? The game requires an iPad 2 for performance reasons, even though the animation is 2D, not 3D. The game was originally written in Air for play on the PC, so I have little doubt it was less work to port it to the iPad within Air rather than rewriting it natively in Cocoa Touch. But it doesn’t seem right to me that this game doesn’t run on first-gen iPads. Commenters on Brimelow’s post seem to agree.

Update: The game’s description on the App Store includes this: “NOTE: If the game crashes, RESET your iPad, the problem does not have to be on our side!” Such instructions are not unique to games built using Adobe Air, but still, it doesn’t speak well regarding the game’s resource consumption.

★ Monday, 12 September 2011