There's plenty of discussion about the impact of Adobe's Notus technology, which will enable developers to bring Flash games direct to the App Store as native iPhone apps.

So far only eight apps have taken that path; one of which is BlueskyNorth's puzzle game Fickleblox.

We tapped Spencer Britton, studio manager at the Newcastle-based developer of the game to get his view on the situation.

Pocket Gamer: How easy was the process of converting Fickleblox into a native iPhone app?

Spencer Britton: We originally developed Fickleblox in Flash Lite 1.1 so the biggest hurdle was re-scripting from ActionScript1 to ActionScript3.

As the game was already optimised to run on mobile devices - opposed to regular Flash for web games which utilise faster processors and larger screen sizes - we were able to keep the rest of the assets and gameplay relatively untouched.

How useful will it be for you as a developer be able to make native Flash apps in future?

Our core business is Flash for mobile and although we do offer native iPhone/Objective-C development as an additional service, associated costs usually dictate a project is either developed in Flash or iPhone, not on both.

Ideally, with any project, we want to hit as many screens with as few builds or versions of a game as possible. Not only does this reduce development and quality assurance time and costs but we can focus more of our efforts on enhancing features and user experience, which ultimately results in a better product.

Would you prefer Apple to open up iPhone so it would be able to do in-browser Flash games?

For sure. We're very delighted about Flash content being available in the App Store as this provides a great environment and distribution platform for games. Obviously with Flash being such a diverse platform there are many areas of the internet, in addition to gaming, that would benefit hugely from a browser-based solution.

I think it's definitely something iPhone users are eager to have implemented. How else are they going to get rid of those nasty little blue boxes?

What limitations will this system have compared to building native iPhone apps from scratch?

It's early days for Adobe so we anticipate any significant limitations to be ironed out as the technology matures.

The iPhone SDK provides an easy entry point when designing apps based on its native user interface components. I would say this would be the most significant limitation, although I imagine Adobe is targeting the Flash platform to developers of more heavily customised games and applications.

What effect do you think Notus will have in terms of the number of Flash games released onto the App Store?

There will definitely be an increase in the number of games released.

I would anticipate an influx of Flash games that are already popular on the web will be converted as this would be the quickest route to market and also give an insight into the development/conversion process for developers. After that we may see developers adopting a more open screen approach and developing bespoke games and applications that work across multiple devices.

Thanks to Spencer for his time.

You can keep track of BlueskyNorth via its website.