Robotlegs has been released for awhile, and things have changed over the past 7 months for the better.  A major discovery at how the Flash IDE can compile metatdata has recently come to light, so it’s time for an update to this topic which hopefully supersedes both my old way of using Robotlegs in the Flash IDE, and Helmut’s way.
The following article describes what Gaia and Robotlegs are, why you would use them, and how you go about using them together.
Apple has posted Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash“. There are a lot of lies and half truths. No one will care. The article has enough valid points that people won’t check up on them.
That said, here’s my attempts to correct the lies.
*** Update: Paul Taylor (@guyinthechair) has a more recent post on the same subject. ***
*** NOTE: I’m a n00b at Cocoa and Objective C. Unlike Python, I don’t like learning it, either. If you perceive something below is inaccurate, please comment, and I’ll update. ***
Preface
I was having a lot of fun using the iPhone packager. Then Apple changed their licensing to prevent people like me from using ActionScript for iPhone/iPad, and instead being forced to use their toolsets, or those unofficially approved. At first I was furious. Then I tried to get a simple list to scroll in AS3. Even using a fake mask, device fonts, and cacheAsBitmap for all items + container, it just wasn’t smooth, even with just 30 items, regardless of frame rate. If you use an out of the box UITableView in Cocoa, it “just works”.