How is this in the app store

[Colin Holgate]

Adobe have some of the same difficulties to overcome that RunRev have, with regard to loading documents into an iOS app, where the document you're loading is coming from the web. One reason you might work that way is that your online documents are large, and optional. You wouldn't want to have to embed every possible large file just in case a user will get around to viewing all of those optional files.

So, an easy solution is have the media-heavy files be online, and only grab them if the user wanders into that part of your app. That then gets you into the problem area of whether those online files have any code in them. Apple do allow code that could also appear in Safari pages, HTML and Javascript would be ok, but no other code really.

The way Adobe have solved this problem is to strip out all code at publish time, and to put the code into the main app, and to also export a set of code-less document files (swfs in the case of Flash). You then can place those large swfs online, and at runtime when you download one of them, it gets hooked up with its code, which is already waiting for it in the main app.

This way you submit an app to the App Store that contains all of the code that it will ever need, and yet you can apparently download and run online documents that have lots of code in them. They don't really have code in them, but by the time they are in use in your app, they do.