Apple's Developer Tools Turnaround 'Great News' For Adobe 234
cgriffin21 writes "Apple is being praised for loosening of some of the restrictions in its Application Developer Program license agreement that open the door for app developers to work in Flash for the Apple iPhone, iPad and other devices. And no one is happier about the change than Flash-maker Adobe itself. They wrote, 'This is great news for developers and we're hearing from our developer community that Packager apps are already being approved for the App Store. We do want to point out that Apple's restriction on Flash content running in the browser on iOS devices remains in place.'"
Apple also received praise from Google over their reversal, which may have been prompted by an FTC probe. Reader Stoubalou adds that Apple shed more light on the app review process by publishing a list of guidelines (PDF) the violation of which may get an app rejected from the App Store.
Re:WiFi (Score:5, Informative)
The WiFi API is private that's why those types of apps were rejected. Believe me I know, we had a game based on finding WiFi hotspots we wanted to port from the DS, but didn't because we knew it wouldn't be approved for use of private API's.
Private API rejections are one of the rejections that actually makes sense. In those cases, you need to argue for Apple to make the particular API public rather than for them accept apps that use private API's that the company has no obligation to maintain compatibility for, so could change at any time, breaking your application.
Re:WiFi (Score:3, Informative)
They're still verboten by the new rules:
2.5 Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected
The wireless framework is a non-public API under iOS.
Re:Eerie (Score:3, Informative)
This is eerily similar to Microsoft being praised for Windows 7 after pushing Vista. Sure the situation is completely different, but praising a company for finally listening to consumers is the wrong way to go about it.
You could argue that they didn't listen to consumers, or developers, but did it because they were under investigation for anti-competitive behavior [cnet.com] on this, both in US and EU. A conviction on this would be tough on the image, even for Apple.
Re:Praise? (Score:1, Informative)
Objective-C isn't a requirement to develop for iPhone. I should also point out that this doesn't put Flash on the iPhone either as some trolls are claiming. It simply allows developers to use the Adobe Packager to port junk Flash apps and compile them for iOS.
Re:Flash is not restricted in Safari (Score:5, Informative)
1) High-quality fast vector graphics with morphing and keyframe animation. Nothing in HTML5 is even close (sorry, Canvas is just a toy).
2) Video overlays and compositing.
3) Audio (nope, HTML5 doesn't have enough support).
4) Language with optional typing and fast VM. JS is not yet there.
"Heck, they've even ported Quake to HTML5 [techcrunch.com]. That is quite a bit more advanced program than most Flash apps."
Nope, they haven't. They ported it to WebGL which is NOT a part of HTML5 draft standard.
Re:bad news... (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently. Firefox CPU utilization without Lexulous (a non-animated Flash-based Facebook game - shut up, my Mom likes to play it with us) is about 8%-10%. (This is with Twitter and Facebook open which presumably are doing AJAX polling in the background.)
Throw open Lexulous, and I discover that I'm losing again (bah), and the CPU usage shoots up to 90% as long as that tab is open. With a Flash app that is literally sitting there doing nothing. No animation, no AJAX polling, just showing a Scrabble board.
So, joke or not, yes, it would appear that somewhere Flash has found the equivalent of suck_battery_life() and has a rather liberal usage policy for it.
Disclaimer: the computer I'm trying this on is an old Mac Pro G5, so I'd hope modern computers wouldn't be quite as bad, but still, that's pretty horrible.
Re:Good news, everybody! (Score:3, Informative)
I'm talking about how everyone was pretty well in agreement that Flash sucks until Apple said they wouldn't allow it on iOS. Then suddenly it's like, "How could they do that?! Flash is awesome and efficient and never crashes and is an integral part of the web! It's a perfect little diamond of the application and is everything computer applications and frameworks should be!"
I'm not sure where you've got this line from, because it certainly wasn't that way on Slashdot. In pretty much every Flash-on-iOS discussion I've seen here, vast majority of arguments in favor of Flash started with "Flash sucks, but ...". A few people (myself included) then pointed out that a Flash application for something is preferable to no application. Others focused on the freedom of choice angle. Some on portability. But, come to think of it, I don't recall any post that would actually praise Flash for being awesome. The closest that comes to it is some people making remarks that Flash isn't slow on their boxes as you'd think from reading Slashdot; but that isn't exactly an endorsement.
Re:Flash is not restricted in Safari (Score:3, Informative)
Not really. It's possible to have other items over the "video" tag, but effects like 'fade in' are going to be difficult.
"Support is there. Including the ability to generate audio from code. Which lacking feature do you feel is necessary?"
Not really. There's no programmatic access to live audio stream. There are some proposed extensions: http://ajaxian.com/archives/amazing-audio-sampling-in-javascript-with-firefox but nothing standard so far.
"There is no reason why a Javascript app cannot interpret it. You're probably got me on performance, but that does not stop one from implementing said features."
I'm talking about AS3, it has optional typing to speed up JIT. So far, it works much better than most JavaScript JITs.
Re:Flash is not restricted in Safari (Score:3, Informative)
Which is a total phail.
There's no real animation support for SVG and its renderers are dog-slow.
You see, vector model of SVG is not really suitable for morphing and keyframe animation. In SVG, pictures are composed of polygons, which are composed of vertices connected by edges.
Suppose that we have a picture of two adjacent triangles (a square with one diagonal).
Then in SVG it will be represented as 4 vertices and 2 triangles composed from these vertices. These triangles are separate and are not dependent on each other.
Flash uses completely different way to represent data: as a plane divided into sections. So to get this picture you start with a plane (frame surface), and divide it into two adjacent areas. The diagonal line is represented not as a line from point A to point B, but as an element dividing two areas.
This gives a lot of advantage, Flash player can easily and smoothly animate scenes. There's no risk of ugly 'hole' effects caused by numerically instable algorithms or incorrect processing of self-intersections.