Think your iPhone can’t run anything created by Adobe Flash? Think again. But before you rush off to view Flash movies on sites you couldn’t before, read on.

According to Wired’s Gadget Lab, a clever programmer has managed to get the iPhone to run Adobe Flash-created interactive apps. Best of all, since the trick only works inside Mobile Safari, it’s outside the jurisdiction of Apple’s heavy-handed App Store approvals.

Before you get excited, the software, called “Gordon,” doesn’t actually allow Flash itself to work on the iPhone. Instead, it’s a Javascript runtime written by programmer Tobias Schneider which lets Mobile Safari actually display (and play) Shockwave .swf files. For the non-technical among us, a “runtime” is essentially just a collection of software that allows code to run inside it -- its own mini OS, of sorts.

Now for the bad news: The Gordon software hack is limited only to websites that have installed it. That means that each website developer would have to add the runtime to every instance of Flash on their site. Even though the trick requires a few extra lines of code to call the runtime into action, it seems unlikely that too many sites will actually go to the trouble to enable this.

The good news is, Gordon is an open source project available to anyone who wants to use it. However, there’s still no getting around the fact that Adobe Flash is a resource hog, which can drag down even the best browser on a fast desktop system.

You can see the results of this trick for yourself by pointing Mobile Safari to the Gordon demonstration page (which will also work on any desktop browser, although it’s less impressive there). No hacking required on the user end!