Adobe's iPhone Hail Mary 115
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the move to port Flash to the iPhone isn't a last-ditch effort on Adobe's part to remain relevant in the quickly evolving smartphone market. By allowing developers to compile existing Flash apps into native binaries, Adobe believes it has found a way around Apple's requirements that no non-Apple API interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an app, a clause that has also prevented Sun from porting JVM to the iPhone. The resulting apps will be completely stand-alone, with no runtimes and no Flash Player required — if Apple lets Adobe get away with it, no small feat given how protective Apple has been about its app market. But as much as Apple has at stake here, Adobe may actually have more, McAllister writes. 'Already the idea of using Web languages and tools to build smartphone applications is taking hold. Palm has built an entire smartphone platform around the idea. Apple supports the use of Web technologies like AJAX to build applications based on the iPhone's Safari browser. And developers will soon even be able to build Web-based applications for BlackBerry handsets, thanks to a new SDK from Research in Motion. As late to the game as it is, what Adobe needs now is to convince developers that Flash is better than the other options — and that could be a tough sell.'"
Adobe can bite back real bad (Score:1, Funny)
Recently, Mono was ported to Apple iPhone claiming to carry Apple requirements. That is "almost" .NET for iPhone, a framework which has nothing to do with Cocoa and if you ask me, it is the perfect trojan of MS for iPhone.
http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:Iphone [mono-project.com]
If Apple says "but this is workaround", they will simply show dozens of .NET apps ported via Mono. Also Novell has a little to harm Apple on Pro Desktop but Adobe can do real evil things without Apple able to do anything against it. They can say "We have problems with almost zero backwards compatibility with Apple operating systems, we are giving up OS X to focus on Windows and we may release some of our professional apps to Linux." Apple's "this depreciated, this gone, carbon? no 64bit" really cost them millions already and they are taking the flames, PR disasters when they have to say "no 64bit yet". Apple changed their mind about 64bit carbon (non existence) in 1 day, announced it on some basic event requiring millions of lines to be rewritten in Cocoa. I am really surprised Trolltech/Nokia (Qt) could move to Cocoa that fast to get 64bit support, that framework is the reason why Skype/Google earth can ship in sync on OS X. It is not just KDE.
Re:Adobe can bite back real bad (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Adobe can bite back real bad (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah agreed. If I were going to make a markov chain from slashdot articles about iphones, flash, and mono, I'm pretty sure the output would be quite like the GPs post.
It'd probably get modded up too because it'd hit all the key words to trigger the brainless mods who just scan for phrases that they like.
Re:PHP for mobile phones (Score:3, Funny)
Can't someone please berate me for developing web apps in ASP Classic. I know that my clients are happy because I always deliver the features they want on time and on budget and my apps always pass website security audits and are very stable and all but surely there must be someone out there who can tell me how wrong I am for using it.