Adobe Evangelist Lashes Out Over Apple's "Original Language" Policy 789
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's recent decision to restrict the languages that may be used for iPhone and iPad development has provoked some invective from Adobe's platform evangelist Lee Brimelow. He writes on TheFlashBlog, 'This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple's devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won't allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe. This does not just affect Adobe but also other technologies like Unity3D.' He ends his post with, 'Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple. Comments disabled as I'm not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots.'"
1984? (Score:4, Interesting)
Surprised? I'm not.. (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't understand why people are surprised that Apple have taken these measures. Time and again they have gone out of their way to make sure they have a vice like grip over aspects of their products.
Even iAds, which was claimed to be an attempt to revolutionize Advert distribution is simply a way for Apple to monopolize and control the money flow through their products.
Fact is, until people start protesting with their money nothing will change. The only way Apple will stop strong arming Adobe is for them to suddenly pull Photoshop from Mac OS. Fight fire with fire.
Shame it'll never happen. I look forward to seeing the ways Apple will surprise us all with their evil policies in the future.
Good luck in your new career Lee (Score:4, Interesting)
What's more interesting to me is that Adobe is now under fire both from Microsoft, who has been trying to supplant all of their software with their own stack, and now Apple. It seems like the only friends Adobe has these days are Linux and Android.
So, hey, Adobe: have you started porting Photoshop yet?
Re:Revenge (Score:3, Interesting)
Adobe can retaliate and abandon Mac platform. Designers and developers who need Adobe's products will move to Windows.
Except with the imminent death of Flash due to the ubiquitous adoption of the iP[hone|ad|od Touch], Photoshop is the major product Adobe is making money with, and that's primarily on Macs. Could they afford to abandon the platform is the real question.
But yeah, this is an elegant solution. If Photoshop were Windows only, a lot of graphic designers would end up abandoning Macs in the long run.
Missing Reason (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I read about this the other day. Rumor has it, the language requirements actually do have a purpose, that is making sure the apps work with the new profiled multitasking setups. Supposedly cross compiled apps don't behave in the same way and individual threads can't be halted to save battery and processing power the same way that native apps can.
Whether or not that is true is a bit above my head. The claim has been made that all of Apple's fancy tricks with threat pausing, fail completely with cross-compiled apps and as a result those apps perform very badly with regard to battery drain. This is somewhat supported by the fact that Apple has applied this only to the version of iPhone OS that includes multitasking and not to older versions including current development for 3.x.
Others have also faulted Gruber for misquoting them in his rant by claiming Unity3D will no longer be allowed, despite the fact that the person he was quoting said maybe it will or maybe it won't as it is actually a pre-compiler and it does create objective C source files. The rant should be taken with a grain of salt as it is from a fairly biased Adobe employee.
Anything but Flash (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as an iPhone user ...who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
First, Flash sucks for me as a user so I am thrilled it's going to die. Sorry if a few developers love it, but that's not my problem nor do I care if they have to learn new things. Thank you Apple.
Second, as an iPhone user there is nothing I miss on a daily basis being able to do with the iPhone. Do I wish that there was more flexibility with some apps? Yes. Do I think it's this huge deal, no. Fact is the control Apple is doing has benefits and negatives. For most people the benefits of a closed community, screened apps that haven't had viruses or malware, and a wonderful intuitive GUI (IMHO, Android is getting closer but is still not consistent nor as intuitive as iphone or Palm WebOs) and easy upgrades that actually are released to the phones (as opposed to the fragmentation that's Android) is worthwhile. Fact is Android Droid are STILL waiting for Verizon to let them get 2.1 of Android. How's that for control? If you want control, get yourself an out of contract pay as you go GSM type phone (like the Nokia or somethiing). But for the rest of us people who just need a smartphone and not a portable computer, the iphone is a great device.
Re:Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad (Score:2, Interesting)
Unity3D not threatened. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Surprised? I'm not.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way Apple will stop strong arming Adobe is for them to suddenly pull Photoshop from Mac OS.
You don't think there's already a move by Adobe away from MacOS? Interesting. You clearly don't use Adobe's Creative Suite in your day job.
Many of us who do have noticed a distinct shift in their design philosophy away from making a Mac program for graphic designers towards making a PC program for graphic designers which happens to run on the Mac. The examples are small yet numerous and it paints a clear picture, to anyone who actually thinks about it for a second, that Adobe was the first to turn their backs on the Mac community. I believe there's been a cold war brewing behind closed doors for years now and, while Apple may have been the most obvious about bringing it into the light, Adobe was the first to act on it with their shift in design philosophy with CS3.
Re:Learning from the past (Score:4, Interesting)
> Not all issues surrounding control are negative. Sometimes it's just about controlling your own destiny and place in the market.
But the reports I've read suggest that Android is going to own the iPhone, because loads of manufacturers are either releasing or planning to release phones, laptops and other devices using Android, as opposed to the small number Apple is going to be able to support. Also, developers are pissed off with the control. Sure, they'll put up with it whilst dreaming of making some stupid app which'll make their fortune, but that was 2008/9 and now they've experienced the however many month delay while Apple figure out whether your app is going to bypass their control (wifi, emulation, whatever this weeks dumb rule is) before sticking it on their website they're much more likely to take a good look at the totally open java/c++/linux combo of Android and have a play with it.
Re:Apple's Developer Relations (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, their "developer relations" are the shit they deposited on your face, and the money you wasted developing an app that they ended up rejecting. Oh, it's so wonderful to develop for Apple's platforms.
Re:Revenge (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd guess they think the answer to that is "yes". I think they are very wrong about that, but it seems they don't value Apple custom. If they did, they wouldn't have delayed the intel versions of CS3 for a year. That definitely cost Apple in people upgrading to intel machines.
I dare say that's at least part of the reason why they are keen to kill flash. That, and the fact that Apple's ideology is all about user experience -- and Adobe's is very, very far from that.
Re:Revenge (Score:1, Interesting)
Photoshop is primarily a Windows program. It looks like ass on Macs....
It's actually pretty surprising, given that Macs are managing to maintain market share despite not really having a the good version of Photoshop.
Its a Technical Decision (Score:5, Interesting)
Before I got flashblock, any site I would visit with flash adds would instantly send my processors to about %60, and the fans would start spinning (X3100 MacBook). The situation is even worse in Linux. Would you expect the flash runtime to be any better on the iPhone????
This is the exact same crap that Semantec pulled in the 90's with their 'java compiler', they advertised a java dev tool that I paid about 150$ for that claimed to produce native executables. Well, technically it did, they produced an giant executable, with the entire java interpreter statically linked in, and your code statically linked in, so at runtime it would just interpret your code using the linked in interpreter.
Same freaking thing that CS5 does.
All Apple it trying to do is limit the number of crap applications. If there are all of a sudden all kinds of apps built on flash, battery life drops to minutes, then people will be pissed and most likely blame apple, when its flash's fault.
And their probably is no way to even write a runtime for flash that will not drain battery, because flash is all timer based. The runtime needs to allocate all kinds of timers that are firing at a very fast rate, so there would be NO POSSIBLE WAY to suspend the app in a multitasking env.
I do think Apple went a bit too far, I think they should have allowed apps written in Python/Ruby or some other decent lang, but absolutely ban flash.
And BTW, what is more cross platform then C/C++ and Javascript???
Note, even if they somehow figured out a way to compile CraptionScript to native code, the fundamental problem is the TIMER /EVENT based programming model of flash, where the runtime creates a timer that fires every millisecond to tiger the animations and craptionscript events. CPU usage was not one of the design goals of flash, the fundamental design goal of it was to make obnoxious animations trivial by point and click development tools. Hogging CPU resources was fine I suppose on desktop machines with unlimited power resources, but its a no-go on devices with limited battery capacity.
Objective C (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh, the original Macintosh was pretty damn interesting....
... and completely locked-down in every respect. You could write your own software - if you used Apple's tools. You could design your own peripherals - *if* they plugged into a slightly non-standard serial port. Expansion? Forget it. Steve Jobs was incredibly hostile to the idea of anyone opening up their Mac and "improving" it, to the extent that the case was designed to be impossible to open without special factory jigs to press the right plastic clippy bits.
The true modern successor to the Apple II was the PC, although the BeBox came a close second. Geek Port, anyone?
No Reason For Banning Upstream Tools (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I read about this the other day. Rumor has it, the language requirements actually do have a purpose, that is making sure the apps work with the new profiled multitasking setups. Supposedly cross compiled apps don't behave in the same way
That's plausible (a little tenuous, but plausible) if you're talking about restrictions against using another toolchain to build your binary.
But section 3.3.1 also bans upstream tools that generate code consumed by Apple's toolchain. You can't write code in another language to write C/C++/ObjC code for you. Which means you're telling developers that they can't write tools that make their lives easier. What's the justification for that?
Here's an already popular iPad app essentially written using Mathematica [popsci.com]:
Apparently it runs afoul if 3.3.1.
Frankly, it's not clear to me that every iPhone app doesn't run afoul of 3.3.1. Unless you actually think in C/C++/Objective C, every program is arguably first a set of cognitive abstractions in a human brain. Or, as this article [joeberkovitz.com] puts it, with this restriction, "Apple may thus be the first company to bet the farm on Cartesian dualism."
There are other problems [knowing.net] with Apple's approach.
Battle for the platform. (Score:3, Interesting)
Adobe wants to make Flash the platform for mobile devices.
Apple wants to keep application development native so the can control their own platform.
Both of these are reasonable goals.
Personally I would rather have native applications, than cross platform Flash-to-App generator.
If you think there is too much crapware in the Appstore now, what would it look like when every flash writer starts hitting "convert to iPhone button"?
So while I don't know if that wording change means that there will be no Flash-to-App conversion in the Appstore, I certainly hope that is the case.
I am sad that nothing can be done to keep it off Android...
Re:Surprised? I'm not.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Although I strongly condemn Apple's bullying tactics, I can only say that Adobe had this coming for a long time.
Back in the 80s, at the dawn of desktop publishing, Apple held a kind of symbiotic relationship with Adobe, Aldus, and Macromedia, the once-competing companies that eventually merged into today's Adobe. But somewhere in the late 90s Adobe started to drop the ball on Apple as they saw greener pastures in Windows Land. They started to invest much more in the development of the Windows versions of many of their products and Mac versions started to become second-class products.
Adobe even used Premiere as leverage against Apple, threatening to stop its development for the Mac, something that would have essentially kicked Apple out of the video editing market. That's why Apple bought and started heavy development of Final Cut (1999?). Adobe in fact pulled the plug from Premiere (2003?) until they realized that this has backfired on them making them loose a lot of the video market (2007?).
But perhaps the epitome of Adobe's contempt for Apple is Flash. if you think Flash for windows is crappy, you haven't seen the Mac version (or for that matter the Linux one). Macromedia Flash was equally good for Mac and Windows, but while the performance of the Windows version was kept almost acceptable, the Mac version became even more sluggish, processor intensive, and buggy.
Furthermore, Flash became probably the biggest security hole in Mac OS X. in the security update for January, 12 vulnerabilities were plugged. But seven of them were not really in the operating system but in the flash pluggin!
Again, I reject Apple's tactics. But with all this, it is not surprising that Apple doesn't want flash anywhere near their new products even if this kills their former ally. These two companies long ago lost any reason to trust each other, and now Apple is punishing Adobe for treating them with contempt.
Re:Its a Technical Decision (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad (Score:5, Interesting)
First of all, there's no comparison between C/C++/ObjC and managed languages languages like C# and Java. Two of the largest classes of bugs (memory allocation and buffer overflow) are entirely eliminated. You simply can't write a double-free in Java or C#; it's just not possible. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs won't let you write an app without having to worry about them.
Second, Google and MS don't care what language you originally wrote your app in. Even if MS only supports C#, they're not going to stop you from using VB, F#, Python, or Ruby. Google doesn't make you sign some NDA preventing you from using Scala or Groovy. There is no specific list of approved languages, and as far as I know there is nothing to prevent you from writing an interpreter that runs on the platform. If you want to run a DOS program on an iPad, you're SOL. If you want do so on an Android, just port a DOS emulator over to Java!
Third, MS and Google are only telling you what your compilation *target* must be. Well, duh! All platforms have some machine that they ultimately run on. There's nothing wrong with Apple saying that your compiler has to output ARM machine code. It might even be OK if Apple said that it had to be a C, C++, or Objective-C compiler. The real problem is that Apple is saying what kind of code you can write in your *editor*!
dom
Re:I await the day that Apple..... (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd have a point about the assembly, except that Adobe's software already runs on Windows, on x86. If they have x86 assembly for the Windows version and PowerPC assembly, they can run it on OS X on x86.
Your third point is actually a good counterexample. The Win32 API contains a lot of things that are very endian-sensitive and even sensitive to the size of long. Lots of structures are expected to be dumped directly to disk, with 32-bit little-endian longs. Most Win32 API code would not work on a big endian CPU, while OS X moved from a big endian to a little endian architecture. Most Win32 code would also not work on an ILP64 or LP64 platform, which is why Win64 is about the only LLP64 platform in the world. For a longer explanation, see Raymond Chen [msdn.com].
Re:Who didn't see this coming? (Score:3, Interesting)
Blah, Blah, blah. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bottom line:
I'll be getting an iPad. I'll be upgrading my v1 iPhone to the new one that come out this summer.
And so will millions of others...
Lee Brimelow may be right, or he may not. I don't have time to read the article. But I will say that if he ever hopes to resolve the situation, as an Adobe employee complaining in public in an (apparently) official capacity, he's not helping the situation. This only adds to the bad vibes, and Steve is stubborn and this will only serve to bolster his resolve if it does anything at all.
In my personal experience Adobe products, especially CS4 and acrobat, have become unwieldy, bloated pieces of software on the Mac, and I know that acrobat on Windows is so big it's almost unusable. Maybe Lee should quit bitching about Apple and get on Adobe's developers to develop higher quality software. As a paying Adobe customer, I would appreciate that immensely.
Re:Surprised? I'm not.. (Score:3, Interesting)
To all you said, you can add:
- No 64 bit Adobe products for the mac for a long time (next version will have it)
- Adobe not wanting to use cocoa and releasing carbon version of the mac products
Re:Why doesn't Adobe leave Apple? (Score:2, Interesting)
I bet Adobe is quaking in their boots. Apple was able to produce an app better than Photoshop Elements.
Hail the Mighty Apple, who can defeat a crippled version of a competitor's app.
Revenge is a dish best served cold (Score:4, Interesting)
1997: Adobe wants Apple to pay workstation prices for Display Postscript licenses for the new OS, "Rhapsody", which would have completely priced them out of the market. Apple has to rewrite the graphics layer for Rhapsody/OS X, and it's delayed 2-3 years.
2010: Payback is a bitch.
That is the rumor in Cupertino. (Score:3, Interesting)
None of my friends at Apple are on the iPhone or iPad teams, or in senior management, so who knows for sure... But the common rumor going around the rest of the company is that Steve took the "no 64-bit CS for Macs" thing as something of a personal slap in the face. Adobe, if you'll remember, rathar cravenly waited until Steve's health was especially precarious to pull that stunt.
The rumor mill also goes that once CS is natively 64-bit on Macintosh, and after a suitable period of pennitance, a new round of security and performance testing will show that Flash is finally in a state suitable for iPhone OS.
Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
Come on, surely if the NeXT computer was all that, it wouldn't have been the colossal failure it was. There were plenty of potential customers who could afford one but passed.
In fact I've always suspected that basing the next Apple OS on NeXTStep was necessary to get Jobs to return to Apple. That way he could essentially "erase" his failure.
The computer was a failure because it was 10 years ahead of the rest of the industry. Steve learned that you don't need to be the latest in hardware technology to become a leader in the industry. When people were crying foul about $5,000 workstations, we at NeXT were selling $10-$15k workstations to the education markets and research markets. The system was cutting edge. The rest of the industry was enamored with 256 colors while NeXT was standing here with 4096 colors. Then they jumped to 16 and 32 bit color solutions. Sorry, but NeXT was too far ahead to ever make a broad impact.
Steven P. Jobs has learned that invaluable lesson and it shows with Apple in it's present direction.
Re:Surprised? I'm not.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I too have developed for 'both sides' not for Adobe a different 'lower tier' company. The PC is 'easier'. MS is amazing bend over backwards for the developers. Apple has always been amazingly bend the developers over. The difference you missed in your 'skipping the rest' was the fact that adobe is the 3rd largest software vendor out there in the MS world. Then how did they find out about the intel move? An 'oh btw' in a keynote?! MS does *NOT* ignore them. Apple on the other hand is very 'well we put some stuff on the web site dig it up yourself, or here are our press releases... good luck'.
I have dealt with Apple and MS in getting 'support'. MS was always top notch work and they do not stop until it is resolved. Apple I always felt like 'how dare I bother them with such trivialities'.
Ever wonder why Apple went from the 90% market share in the early 80's to the 5% it is now? Its because they have always treated their 3rd party devs like crap. Even the top tier ones. Photoshop was pretty much *THE* only app keeping them alive in the 90s and Apple comes back and treats them like crap. They have changed out the whole platform about 20 times over the years and then just go 'oh well sucks to be you HAHAHA'. Then wondered why no one wanted to make hardware or software for them.
Honestly MS's business practices make me sick. But Apple is the zen guru master Bill Gates takes tips from.
I can understand why they are forcing the API thing and sticking to it. They want the devs to 'just recompile' and it works or at least works quickly on the iPhone version 20 with the new cpu arch that they switched out too. This means you play Apples game. You play it their way. You *WILL* however get burned at some point by it. I can name at least 10 companies off the top of my head who thought as you did. These were multimillion dollar per year companies that were 'gone' overnight because of some change in the wind at Apple. These were hardcore 'we only develop for Apple' shops. Use them as a business partner at your peril.
The computer industry put MS on top because Apple and IBM was just that shitty to deal with. We were willing to look the other way when it did monopoly type things (eventually it became too much). It looks like a whole new set of developers needs to learn the lesson again 'deal with Apple and you will get burned eventually'.
I remember the day Apple dropped all support for 3rd party OS install. All of my fellow developers looked like Apple had taken their puppy away. Within 2 months we were all looking for jobs. No one was buying Apple software anymore. Why should they when a equiv PC was half the price?
People got tired of the Apple treadmill. Every 2-4 years totally changing out software and hardware. People want a bit more platform stability out of computers. Even if they buy them every 6 months.
I can buy a piece of software from the mid 90s written for windows and have a pretty good shot at it working. I can not do that with a Mac. I guarantee in 5 years all those cool apps you bought for your iPhone will not work anymore unless you keep the same phone. I understand that computers progress. But Apple needs to stop changing the platform. Hell you could say they changed it again with the iPhone.
Re:Good luck in your new career Lee (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been saying for years that if Adobe were smart, they would be working on their own operating system to compete with Microsoft. It's not as thought Microsoft isn't invading Adobe's turf with XPS, Silverlight, and their Expression Suite.
If Adobe prettied up a Linux distribution, ported their Creative Suite and supported it on this new platform, and put some work into making OpenOffice a little more presentable, it would be the scariest moment the people at Microsoft have ever experienced.
Re:Speaking as an iPhone user ...who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
First, Flash sucks for me as a user so I am thrilled it's going to die. Sorry if a few developers love it, but that's not my problem nor do I care if they have to learn new things. Thank you Apple.
I didn't put it together until just now, but this is all starting to remind me of Apple refusing to support WMA on iPods. For anyone who has a short memory, a few years ago, every online music store except for Apple sold DRM-wrapped WMA files, but the iPod didn't play WMA files, let alone DRM-wrapped WMA files. Record labels were all mad, because it meant that a single company controlled all the music sales that went to the most popular media player. People on Slashdot were pissed, because how *dare* Apple refuse to support an open standard like WMA, instead only supporting Apple's proprietary AAC format (AAC apparently used to stand for "Apple Audio Codec").
Jobs offered a solution: drop DRM completely. Eventually the labels dropped DRM and everyone here gave Amazon the credit. I know some people still use WMA, but really it may as well be a dead format-- I can't think of any reason anyone would use it. Microsoft's plans to dominate media have been significantly damaged. Customers get to buy DRM-free music. Labels and customers get compatibility across stores, decreasing lock-in.
Maybe we'll get lucky and Jobs kill Flash the same way he killed WMA and audio DRM.
Re:Apple Original language lockdown. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Surprised? I'm not.. (Score:1, Interesting)
I too have developed for 'both sides' not for Adobe a different 'lower tier' company. The PC is 'easier'. MS is amazing bend over backwards for the developers. Apple has always been amazingly bend the developers over. The difference you missed in your 'skipping the rest' was the fact that adobe is the 3rd largest software vendor out there in the MS world. Then how did they find out about the intel move? An 'oh btw' in a keynote?! MS does *NOT* ignore them. Apple on the other hand is very 'well we put some stuff on the web site dig it up yourself, or here are our press releases... good luck'.
I have dealt with Apple and MS in getting 'support'. MS was always top notch work and they do not stop until it is resolved. Apple I always felt like 'how dare I bother them with such trivialities'.
Ever wonder why Apple went from the 90% market share in the early 80's to the 5% it is now? Its because they have always treated their 3rd party devs like crap. Even the top tier ones. Photoshop was pretty much *THE* only app keeping them alive in the 90s and Apple comes back and treats them like crap. They have changed out the whole platform about 20 times over the years and then just go 'oh well sucks to be you HAHAHA'. Then wondered why no one wanted to make hardware or software for them.
Honestly MS's business practices make me sick. But Apple is the zen guru master Bill Gates takes tips from.
I can understand why they are forcing the API thing and sticking to it. They want the devs to 'just recompile' and it works or at least works quickly on the iPhone version 20 with the new cpu arch that they switched out too. This means you play Apples game. You play it their way. You *WILL* however get burned at some point by it. I can name at least 10 companies off the top of my head who thought as you did. These were multimillion dollar per year companies that were 'gone' overnight because of some change in the wind at Apple. These were hardcore 'we only develop for Apple' shops. Use them as a business partner at your peril.
The computer industry put MS on top because Apple and IBM was just that shitty to deal with. We were willing to look the other way when it did monopoly type things (eventually it became too much). It looks like a whole new set of developers needs to learn the lesson again 'deal with Apple and you will get burned eventually'.
I remember the day Apple dropped all support for 3rd party OS install. All of my fellow developers looked like Apple had taken their puppy away. Within 2 months we were all looking for jobs. No one was buying Apple software anymore. Why should they when a equiv PC was half the price?
People got tired of the Apple treadmill. Every 2-4 years totally changing out software and hardware. People want a bit more platform stability out of computers. Even if they buy them every 6 months.
I can buy a piece of software from the mid 90s written for windows and have a pretty good shot at it working. I can not do that with a Mac. I guarantee in 5 years all those cool apps you bought for your iPhone will not work anymore unless you keep the same phone. I understand that computers progress. But Apple needs to stop changing the platform. Hell you could say they changed it again with the iPhone.
As a software developer for developing applications for both Windows and Mac for the last decade, I cannot agree with this more. We have a special term for Apple's changing out the platform software and hardware every 2-4 years. It is called "Apple Tax". Instead of dedicating most of our time and effort developing solutions that have a greater customer impact, we have to carve out significant portion of time and resource to make our application work with the new framework/hardware etc. If you're a big shop, you can probably afford it and play along; else you are screwed!!!