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)
Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.
This week, Slashdot featured a really good article form Slate [slashdot.org] that ended with this quote [slate.com]:
Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.
That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words [paulgraham.com] at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism [paulgraham.com]? That's the real debate here.
Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the geeks at /. are in love with Woz's Apple, everyone else is in love with Steve's Apple.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Would that Mean that Gates is the Snake in apple tree?
Re:HOW MANY FUCKING TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU (Score:4, Funny)
Re:HOW MANY FUCKING TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me correct that:
Microsott = Evil
Apple = Evil
Google = Somewhat less evil
Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple (Score:5, Funny)
"the geeks at /."
As opposed to who else at /.?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As opposed to who else at /.?
The astroturfers?
Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you notice the name at the top of this website? We are not everyone else.
If we were "everyone else" we wouldn't have bought the products that first put Apple on the map. If we were "everyone else" we wouldn't have bothered with the odd devices called "personal computers" in the first place and would have just watched TV. If we were "everyone else" we'd be over at Wired Magazine soaking up the advertising that wants us to "just work" so we can "just shut up and buy". If we were "everyone else" we wouldn't be the ones people run to so we can explain to them which end of the USB cable is which.
If we were "everyone else" we wouldn't even know what a slash, followed by a dot, even means.
Don't tell me about how "everyone else" just loves locked-down technology. When you tell me what "everyone else" wants, it doesn't exactly make me want to run out and buy it so I can be like "everyone else".
Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Under Scully, and later, Spindler, Apple certainly wasn't as monetarily successful, but the company did see a great measure of valuable hardware and software experimentation without which the computing world would be a much less interesting place. Firewire, Apple Newton (would there even be an iPhone or iPad today without the Newton?), IBM's continued development of the Power line and the CPUs that power the GameCube, the Wii, and the Xbox 360 (linked to Apple if not emerging directly from Apple), Open Transport (fantastic technology which SHOULD have been extended through to OS X), HyperCard... There's more but I've been out of the loop long enough it's hard to recall everything.
No, when Jobs was originally removed from the company it was because he was in danger of driving it into the ground. While Apple still eventually saw some decline, they certainly hung in there and released lots of great technologies and ideas, even if some of the implementations were lacking or too ahead of the market. Jobs was brought back to save the company he almost sank. Jobs needed that time away and Apple needed that time to explore the market and technology. When the two were reunited both had grown in important ways. The modern Apple would probably not be the success it is without Jobs, but Jobs could not have created this Apple without his time away from the company in which the company was able to explore avenues Jobs would never have allowed.
The question now is, will this cycle somehow repeat itself in some way?
Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple (Score:4, Funny)
1. Remove your nose from between his ass cheeks.
2. Don't put your nose back in between his ass cheeks.
3. Don't smell things, including your fingers, which have been between someone else's ass cheeks.
4. Follow these same rules with your own ass cheeks, just in case you are having irrational butthurt as well.
That's it, really. HTH!
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?
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Apple: NO, No, that's not true, that's impossible.
IBM: Search your feelings, you know it be true.
Apple: NOOOO, NOOOOO
IBM: Join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son.
Apple: Yes father.
Unity3D not threatened. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except you might be in trouble if you use C# or Boo for your game script since the scripting is build on Mono!
Re:Unity3D not threatened. (Score:5, Informative)
Is the Unity3D [unity3d.com] Game Engine threatened? I doubt it. Adobe, yes. Unity, no. I think this Adobe guy is reading between the lines of Apple's announcement. He knows Flash (its code generator workaround, not Flash itself) will be targeted, but not Unity3D. He's only trying to get Apple to admit its hidden agenda, or goad them into banning Unity3D to maintain consistency (which would only go against Apple's interests, Unity3D already has many top selling titles, the code generator from Adobe is not even close).
It's not just him, Ars Technica has a writeup [arstechnica.com] about the new terms and they felt it was probably targeting Adobe and Google both, by making it harder to do cross-platform development. (Since it basically outlaws many development tools.) Ars lists "Novell's MonoTouch, Unity3D, or Ansca's Corona" as definitely going against the new terms, and "Appcelerator's Titanium and PhoneGap" as questionable (in they might or might not run afoul of Apple's gatekeepers).
In all honesty the new clause is ridiculous, have you read it? It says:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
Another thing pointed out (by this developer/blogger [whydoeseve...ngsuck.com]):
Developers are not free to use any tools to help them. If there is some tool that converts some Pascal or, Ruby, or Java into Objective-C it is out of bounds, because then the code is not “originally” written in C. This is akin to telling people what kind of desk people sit at when they write software for the iPhone. Or perhaps what kind of music they listen to. Or what kind of clothes they should be wearing. This is *INSANE*.
Ars also pointed out that at its most extreme the wording would ban writing English pseudocode first, because then the application would not "be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript".
And yes, Unity3d is threatened as it allows you to use C#, which is then compiled down into native ARM assembler. You know, just like Adobe's Flash CS5 was going to let you use Flash to develop iPhone apps and compile it down into ARM assembler. Want to make any bets on whether Apple's consistent on enforcement and bans all Unity3D developed games as well as all future Flash CS5 developed apps?
Re:Unity3D not threatened. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the Unity3D Game Engine threatened?
It looks very much like it will be. The forums are buzzing with fear and anger over there. It also affects a number of other tools including mono-touch. It really goes way beyond Adobe and is going to hurt a lot of developers. If people start using cross-platform toolkits to produce iPhone Apps, the apps are not going to be exclusive for the iPhone. If the same apps are available on Android and other platforms, the iPhone is less of a compelling purchase. That's probably the real reason Java is not allowed. It's not an issue with virtual machines, it's that they want applications to be exclusively developed for the iPhone.
I don't think I'd want to risk time and money writing apps for such a closed system. Even if you totally follow their rules and stick to using their tool chain, who knows what horrors the Terms of Service in version 5.0 of the OS will bring?
Stop drinking the Apple koolaid (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is saying "you can only use C, C++, Objective C, and JavaScript as executed by the iPhone's JavaScript engine". No more, no less. This has fuck all to do with saving your platform from OMG EVIL PORTED GAMES. Poorly ported games are still possible under the new policy. And it applies to many, many things that aren't games. At best, this is an insane and stupid attempt to fuck over Adobe for little reason, and at worst, it's just insane and stupid. Either way, this isn't "good" by any metric that doesn't involve the RDF.
Don't worry though, I'm sure Apple will apply this rule arbitrarily and inconsistently, so you at least won't see the major applications that grossly violate it gone, but it will probably be lots of headaches for everyone else, and be yet another contributing factor to continuing to drive developers away from Apple's little walled garden of madness.
Re:Stop drinking ANYBODY'S koolaid (Score:5, Insightful)
The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple's plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app.
Bullshit.
For starters, C, C++ and Obj-C all compile to native code. Native code is native code - if you have some magic pixie dust "multitasking analyzer" for that, it just works, whatever it is compiled from. There is no "foreign structure" to speak of.
If the said magic analyzer would rely on code patterns produced by a particular compiler, then breaking it would be as easy as changing optimization flags, and every GCC upgrade would result in massive breakage all along the line. It is an architectural decision that is so stupid it cannot even be seriously contemplated.
Furthermore, Apple doesn't restrict just compilers that compile from some-other-language to native. No, they restrict code translators that "compile" from some-other-language to C/C++/Obj-C. If the aforementioned magic analyzer can handle output of GCC, it shouldn't have any trouble witht hat.
Furthermore, Apple also bans wrapper frameworks that can be used for cross-platform development. At this point the intent is perfectly clear - note that the use of frameworks isn't forbidden as such, it's the intent that matters. Of course, the aforementioned multitasking analyzer being powered by the Reality Distortion Field, it may well be affected by mere thoughts...
Finally, and most importantly, there is no "evaluation of apps", because there is still no multitasking for apps. All multitasking there is in iPhone OS 4 is a bunch of stock daemons, all written by Apple and shipped with the phone, that provide certain very specific services. Third-party applications are simply shut down if you switch away from them, though they are given the opportunity to persist their state, and queue any finalization tasks for background processing (that's what one of the daemons is for).
Not that I expect the various MS/Adobe/Android astroturfers and other Apple-haters to accept this. They're not big on rational explanations when it interferers with their world view.
You might want to try rationally explaining your own world view, first. A good place to start would be going point-by-point through this reply.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This sort of misses the point - scripted game engines are critical to all game development these days.
Imagine Microsoft banning any companies releasing Unreal Engine games on 360, because part of the engine is acting as an UnrealScript interpreter, and the same game could be "ported" to PS3 easily. It would be ridiculous. Trying to ban Unity IPhone is ridiculous, especially when - at least in Unity 2.5 - the iPhone version is specifically optimised for the iPhone.
Re:Unity3D not threatened. (Score:4, Informative)
No - that's where the doubt is; the Apple license refers to the language in which the program was "originally written". The most common interpretation of that which people are understanding is that it means "what the programmer typed". No matter what code generation process Unity used, there is no way of getting around the fact that the programmer typed C#/UnityScript/Boo, not C/C++/ObjectiveC.
Re:Your freedom to choose a new master? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Here's hoping you expected no different from any proprietor.
Except Apple just managed to find a new low to sink to.
They took the SOP for console gaming and managed to pull something that's even lower.
I await the day that Apple..... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I await the day that Apple..... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is bullshit through and through, sorry.
The problem here is that Apple is restricting applications that are pure C/C++/ObjC code, not any different in that regard from anything that you'd write manually, so long as that code is generated from something else. Such applications don't pose any more portability problems than any other C/C++/ObjC application written for the platform.
Furthermore, they go ahead and ban all frameworks - even those written in languages that are otherwise allowed - if said frameworks enable cross-platform development. Again, since a framework just calls the same system APIs that an application would otherwise call directly, an app+framework combo is not at all different then just the app alone when it comes to porting to a new architecture.
Nah, this is clearly about control, and forcing people to develop for iPhone and only for iPhone, rather than single app for multiple platforms.
Re:I await the day that Apple..... (Score:4, Informative)
Last I checked, Windows currently runs on 3 hardware platforms in various versions (not counting mobile phone versions). Those are: x86, x86-64, and Itanium.
It does? That's strange, I don't recall having problems on my x86-64 system... Other than it won't run code written for Windows from 15+ years ago.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
it wasn't a migration - they simply ditched their old stuff, appropriated a free OS, slapped a graphical shell on top and graciously allowed third-party developers rework their applications..
Let's check the clue meter. Oh, not good.
Re: (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
Who didn't see this coming? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Apple. For at least 10 years people have been saying that if Apple had MS's market share that things would actually be worse than they are now. Well, now we get a small hint of things to come. OTOH, perhaps Apple is so large now their left hand doesn't know what their right hand is doing.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to continue that line of reasoning, you can also choose not to buy product Y and use something else.
Re:Who didn't see this coming? (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, the ipod connector. Could have very easily been mini/micro usb. But it isn't. And because of that we get mp3/phone docks that are apple only. The reason? Because when you want to buy a new phone or mp3 player you either get to throw away 50$ extra to replace the perfectly good dock as well or stick with apple. It is a trap. Same with the ipod trying to enforce iTunes and occasionally Safari. So that you will be more attatched. And same with this enforced API usage. If you learn apple's api and become comfortable with it you are more likely to code for apple again.
Apple more and more is becoming a trap and already is for the unwary. All unnecessarily so. So Apple can engage in plenty of shitty anti-competitive behaviors without being the only option.
Re:Who didn't see this coming? (Score:5, Informative)
For example, the ipod connector. Could have very easily been mini/micro usb. But it isn't
No it couldn't. The original iPod had a FireWire port. The second generation needed to support FireWire and USB, because most Macs at the time only came with USB 1.1, which was too slow, and most PCs didn't come with FireWire. It also needed a line out signal to connect to the line out port in the dock. The fourth generation also needed composite video out pins to drive a TV from the dock.
Re:Who didn't see this coming? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, the ipod connector could not have been mini/micro USB. Unless you have some way to pass analog audio and composite video via USB without an additional set of a/d/d/a. Now, it could have been mini/micro USB PLUS analog line out/ composite out, but that's something else entirely.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The dock connector has audio and control signals which are used for use in external speaker systems and car docks for example. Also video signals for driving TVs. USB doesn't have those.
You can add them to USB, like HTC did for their mini-USB-compatible connector.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad (Score:3, Informative)
Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad [whydoeseve...ngsuck.com]: "If you need to "originally" write your code in Swahili, while listening to Milli Vanilli, while reclining in a patch of mud, and then you need fifty oompa loompas to translate the Swahili into C, that is none of Steve Jobs fucking business. And the idea, which I am sure is actually the plan, that he will inspect application code to figure out what the "original" language is that the code was written in is just plain pathological."
Re:Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as Microsoft goes... I don't get where where you get the the idea that they "demand" anything. I don't recall having to even ask their permission to write Windows applications more or less ask them for permission to write the application in any of my choosing. Or install them. Or run them. Or distribute them.
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
Way off... (Score:5, Insightful)
Like MS demanding Win7 apps be written in a managed language (ie C#) or Android in Dalvik/Java. iPhone demands C/C++/ObjC. What's the big deal here?
First, I think you mean Windows Phone 7, not Windows 7.
Second, WinPhone7 and Android only "demand" that your compiled program conform to a certain virtual machine spec. You don't have to use their tools or write in their preferred languages; you can use any language that compiles to the right format. (And in fact, Android has a native development kit now, so you can write 99% of your app in any language that compiles to ARM!)
Third, Apple's demand goes even further than the demand you're falsely ascribing to MS and Google. They don't just demand that you have C/C++/ObjC code for your program -- they also demand that your program be originally written in one of those languages.
Let's take a trip down memory lane. In the early 80s, there were no direct C++ compilers: instead, there was something called cfront, which translated C++ code into C. It would be strange for an OS vendor to demand that applications be written in C, of course, because all that really matters is whether the compiled program can run on the hardware. But it would be batshit insane for an OS vendor to prohibit programs that were originally written in C++ and then translated to C, because even if there were some legitimate reason to require C code, it would apply to all C code. There would've been absolutely no technical justification for that ban, just like today there's no technical justification for banning programs translated from Flash to Objective-C.
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:Good luck in your new career Lee (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Learning from the past (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple hasn't forgotten the lesson they learned from IBM and others. Allowing developers to use proprietary tools like Adobe's Flash suite makes them dependent on Adobe's development cycle and not their own. Apple claims to have just released 1500 new API's for iPhone OS. How long will it take for Adobe to support them with their development tools? About as long is it takes to get a version of Flash for OSX that doesn't use 99% of the CPU? Or as long as it takes IBM to release a 3 GHz G5?
Not all issues surrounding control are negative. Sometimes it's just about controlling your own destiny and place in the market.
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:Learning from the past (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Learning from the past (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm gonna throw out a wild guess and say that you have never developed for the iPhone or Android based on your disingenuous response. Last I checked, there were 5 screen sizes and 7 different resolutions. Don't even get me started on the CPU differences, Android OS versions and vendor specific OS changes. If you want to make a mediocre app you can do it withou too much more work. If you want to make an exceptional app you and your designer both have extra work to do. And that was the OPs point. It takes longer. Period. Throw in the fact that your app will make less money on Android (in most cases) and it adds up to there being no real good reason to choose it over the iPhone.
Re:Learning from the past (Score:5, Informative)
I was making no claim as to which platform is easier to develop for, makes more or less money, or about his argument regarding the iPhone. Just pointing out that the "fragmentation" of Android resolutions is more hype than fact.
So please explain why you think my comment was disingenuous.
Re:Learning from the past (Score:4, Insightful)
So you're saying Apple are actually saving us from vendor lock-in by controlling us? How generous of them.
Hmm. I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you suppose Steve Jobs might still be upset about the long delays in Adobe's release of OSX/Intel native products?
Nah.
Re:That is the rumor in Cupertino. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Missing Reason (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Missing Reason (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the problem... tons of non-technical people (and Apple fans) will just take whatever Jobs tells them as gospel without checking up on the facts or anything.
What about all of the non-OS4 apps that are written? They've never used those APIs. So, are they all suddenly going to perform very badly with regard to battery drain? Since they aren't "multitasking", I'm guessing that would be a "no"... since they have to actually, you know, use the new APIs to actually multitask (or not, if they don't want to participate in that). The "pausing" is because the app receives a message from the OS and then the app can elect to ignore it (as will all pre-OS4 apps because, again, they weren't written to acknowledge those messages) or to save its state. If it doesn't save its state then it doesn't 'pause', it just starts over from initial run. If it does save its state, then it has paused and can pick up where it left off when it gets another (new) message to resume.
The cross compiled stuff is also used to throw off non-technical people. As long as the executable program output by the compiler uses the correct methodology, code in it can be linked to the system libraries to perform the tasks exactly as the Obj-C or whatever ones can. If it didn't make the executable right it wouldn't run correctly anyway. Here's something that is disallowed with this thing... I could write an Obj-C routine that does everything perfectly with respect to the new APIs and all that, but if that Obj-C routine then calls something that was written in another language, somehow it suddenly breaks stuff? It simply doesn't happen that way. As long as the compiler is doing its job properly (and they tend to do that), there's no way the OS could tell what language the application was written in. That's why they are APIs... that stands for Application Programming Interface... Interface being a key word... it's how you interface to the libraries. You have to interface to them correctly or all bets are off in the first place. Choice of language is otherwise completely irrelevant as long as it *interfaces* correctly.
Also, applications being written in C/C++/Obj-C have absolutely zero guarantee that they'll meet the requirments. They could have poor battery usage, poor UIs, etc. just like any other app written in any other language. In fact, there are tons of apps in the AppStore that were written in the "blessed languages" that are crappy. If Apple wanted to make sure things conformed to a stricter UI guideline and such, then they could start by actually, you know, putting stricter UI requirements in place and rejecting the ones that don't measure up *regardless* of language it was written in. However, this is clearly not the purpose of the disclosed requirements.
There has been nothing that Apple or any Apple fan defending Apple has said that holds up to logic. The *only* goals of this are: to make cross-platform development as difficult as possible (thus making developers who originally saved time/money by using cross-development tools have to make a choice of whether to support the iPhone or support another mobile platform... and having two code bases is more than 2x the work and cost so it may be too expensive for some developers to do... thus making them choose which to do), and to hurt Adobe (because Jobs is throwing another temper tantrum), Google (because Droid is dangerous to Apple), and Microsoft (who might someday have a product worthy of competition in that market). This is anticompetitive behavior in its purist form.
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: (Score:3, Informative)
You know they did the OTA upgrade for the Motorola Droid for 2.1 went out a month ago right?
Re:Speaking as an iPhone user ...who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Easily.
"Hello, is that the Web development team? This is the CEO. I'm browsing our site on my new iPad, and it's broken. Fix it."
What a choice: Which lock-in do you want? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple is lock-in. Adobe is lock-in. You have a choice of how you'll be locked in. What's the point of developing software?
Conclusions? (Score:4, Informative)
People are jumping to too many conclusions here. Apple updated the developer terms, and has not confirmed that they will shut Adobe-compiled apps out. The compile-flash-to-iPhone feature from Adobe is vaporware anyway for now, as Adobe hasn't really shown it that publicly yet. Appleinsider is reporting that the ban is not from spite but for technical reasons [macnn.com]; as cross-compiled code may interfere with the proper multitasking coming out in iPhoneOS 4.0.
I won't get mad at Apple until it's confirmed that they are shutting it out. Apple selectively enforces it's developer rules (they let Google's app through when it used private APIs), and Apple hasn't commented on the Flash-compiler controversy. No, a ranting Adobe evangelist has as little information as you or I do at the moment.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"proper multitasking" and what Apple is doing don't belong in the same sentence.
If it *was* proper multi-tasking (and the cross-compile didn't do stupid things, of course), there wouldn't be a problem.
Re:Conclusions? (Score:4, Insightful)
"proper multitasking" and what Apple is doing don't belong in the same sentence.
I disagree. What Apple is doing is more complex than is normal, but it also yields better results for platforms where battery and processing power are important limitations.
If it *was* proper multi-tasking (and the cross-compile didn't do stupid things, of course), there wouldn't be a problem.
If the apps thread strangely and don't have clean enough code separations, then it will not be finely grained enough to pause parts of it usefully and those apps will not perform well. It's not entirely unreasonable for Apple to require decent performance with their provided APIs to keep from tarnishing the brand by having their entire device perform poorly as a result of these third party apps.
Re: (Score:3)
proper multi-tasking pre-emptively schedules any kind of process, without it needing to be specially written or compiled to support multi-tasking.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not very proper multitasking then, if it is dependent on which programming language your software was written in. If the iPhone OS cannot multitask random processes, written with any set of tools, then it does not even come close to meeting my personal quality standards. If that is Apple quality, I will stay even further away from Apple than I was already...
What's the fuss? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple just doesn't want lousy bloated code that is generated badly and lazily from some bloated Adobe app that probably costs a fortune.
XCode is free, Cocao touch and ObjC is much nicer to use than most mobile platforms (Symbian is horrid). Why buy some Adobe toolkit and churn out rubbish?
Developers for games consoles have to use the official SDK, why should a handheld gaming platform (that is also a phone) be any different?
"Five Tremendous Apple vs. Adobe Flash Myths" (Score:5, Insightful)
Five Tremendous Apple vs. Adobe Flash Myths
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/10/five-tremendous-apple-vs-adobe-flash-myths/ [roughlydrafted.com]
A bit of his summary:
And so, through a mix of incompetence, belligerence and emotionalist hypocrisy, Adobe has been pumping a non-stop stream of propaganda about how critically important Flash is on mobile devices, even though millions of people been using the highest ranked smartphone for three years now without suffering any ill (not even the rest of humanity on lessor smartphones have missed being able to render desktop Flash content, because they haven’t been able to either). There’s a reason for all that talk: Adobe is terrified.
Re:"Five Tremendous Apple vs. Adobe Flash Myths" (Score:5, Insightful)
1: Neither Nintendo or MS made any pretences about how open their development is (nintendo: follow our rules to the letter, MS: follow our rules, use XNA to make that easier). However not only have Apple made big noises about how easy it is for anyone to develop a huge range of apps for the iphone, they've actively forcibly removed a popular method of coding games by a company they're competing with (hello anti-trust!)
2: Apple like to say they have the complete web on the iphone. Without Flash it isn't the complete web. That is moot however as this point uses circular reasoning. Given that most of that smart phone traffic is from iphones, his point is basically saying "all iphones don't run flash! Therefore it is good that iphones don't run flash" (gotta love logical fallacies).
3: This isn't even a myth, it's something pissed off people would like to see Adobe do but no one really expects them to pull out of one of their main markets. He still struggles to try and make an argument here and basically settles on a vaguely straw man like agument; "Microsoft make some money on macs so this means it's impossible!".
4: Anti-trust. Look it up. you cannot abuse market dominance to actively force companies out of business, especially if the dominance is in a market area. They don't 'owe' Adobe a living but neither do they have the right to actively try to destroy them.
5: Yeah... This is pretty much entirely "HOW DARE YOU QUESTION APPLE" and deliberately obfuscates the difference between including flash in the browser and banning flash being used as a development platform for their devices or allowing a flash player.
Get over it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow, developers have to realize that the iPhone, iPad (and in a certain way an iMac too) are no longer meant to be computers with an operating system. They are devices with an API. As far as I see these API's are trying to protect the devices (and the company and the users).
Get over it.
Re:Get over it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Somehow, developers have to realize that the iPhone, iPad (and in a certain way an iMac too) are no longer meant to be computers with an operating system. They are devices with an API. As far as I see these API's are trying to protect the devices (and the company and the users).
Get over it.
If people bend over each and every time a device like that comes out, the day will come when every single mainstream computer will be nothing more than a device with an API.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Adobe FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
...no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control...
Well, maybe no rational defense other than not wanting apps that drag along a horribly crash-prone Flash runtime--extrapolating from experience with Flash on OS X.
Or, maybe no rational defense other than not wanting apps that are built for some kind of cursor device and will deliver a horrible user experience on a touch-only device.
Apple Original language lockdown. (Score:5, Funny)
Just a thought.
When tens of thousands of Android phones get 0wned, due to some Flash exploit, for example, and at the same time, hundreds of thousands of iPhones don't get 0wned by any exploit, who do you think will be smiling quietly to himself at all the bad publicity towards Android & Google, and at the increase in stock price of Apple.
I don't care that the iPhone is locked down. I don't care that the iPad is locked down. I can write all the software I want for my several Macs here in my home. Not being allowed to do the same for an iPhone or iPad is not something that particularly troubles me.
If I may quote myself from some years back (with a slight rewriting):
You are not the target audience for the iPhone/iPad.
You have never been the target audience for the iPhone/iPad.
You will never be the target audience for the iPhone/iPad.
Really, you might as well be griping about the lack of Ogg Vorbis support in iTunes and the iPod for all the good your whining is going to do.
Re:Apple Original language lockdown. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a thought. When tens of thousands of Android phones get 0wned, due to some Flash exploit, for example, and at the same time, hundreds of thousands of iPhones don't get 0wned by any exploit, who do you think will be smiling quietly to himself at all the bad publicity towards Android & Google
Fear is such an useful tool to keep people quiet and compliant.
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...
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.
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.
You Pretentious, Nieve Twit (Score:5, Insightful)
Owning the APIs has proven time after time to be where the money is at. Microsoft has written that in stone. If there's one thing Steve Jobs, et. al. have learned, is: don't sit on your ass and let somebody else run away with your golden goose. They let Microsoft run away with it once. So did IBM. Which is why he gets it, the lesson is learned - if you let another platform take over your device, you lose any control over the quality of the experience.
You go on about 'we're developers we just want to provide a tool'. Do you really trust your non-developer (maybe you forget once upon a time, Jobs wrote software too) executives at Adobe don't get the power they have to mint money with their platform? To open their own open app store? To begin to charge a per-end-user licensing fee for the next version of the flash compiler for the iphone, once its indispensible?
Let's look at the facts. There's tons and tons of people out there that have some Flash experience and some with actual professional training, and lots without either that can manage to produce something with Flash. Let's call these Flash people "flashies". I'm not comfortable calling them developers, programmers or coders, out of respect to the people that really are. Some very well may be, but if we're going to draw a Venn diagram of Flashies, we all know that's a fairly small percentage of the set that gets to overlap into Software Engineer or Developer. I'm taking the middle road, nothing derogatory.
So these Flashies are out there; they can pound out some moving pictures and stitch it together to do something. Great. See what's happened in Android? You've got a load of crap out there. Steve doesn't like a load of crap. He's trying to do something different than the load of crap permeating the Microsoft ecosystem.
Also, I really appreciate your remarks about how open the Adobe culture is, when obivously your boss said, edit that shit on your blog right now, even if you did say, its' my own personal opinion.
So you are the SWF evangelist. You have drunk the SWF kool-aid. I suppose I might have drunk the Tim Berners-Lee kool-aid. Your platform is not an open standard. Nobody has to give it due respect just because the tools are easy to get started on. Just like some people are visual learners, some are visual Flashies. Cool, y'all seem to have developed a tool to target SWF whether a Flashie is visual, ore more technical. That's neat. You're tools are pretty cool. It would be cooler if you'd open your format up. I know, that would allow competitors an even keel to compete with you on your tools, but hey, that's better for Flashies.
You aren't just buildling the tools. You are selling a proprietary platform too. So is Apple. A lot of their code is open source, and free software at that. And a lot of it isn't. They are competing against RIM & Microsoft and Google for all the marbles right now. Adobe is on all of their radars now as coming hard after the platform. You don't think the Adobe executives let the Flash team go and spend all that development time on the compiler out of the goodness of their hearts, or because it would be paid for by selling the tools to developers. No, there's a lot more craft in the economics of that business decision.
Also, you guys could be bought by Microsoft or Google tomorrow or two years from now, and really fuck Apple in the ass. The scenario: lots of great killer apps are running on your SDK for the iPhone, the apple sdk is no longer in the mindshare of developers... then Microsoft or Google, hai, we bought it, dead now. *poof* the app marketplace is disrupted and the platform dies. Your market cap of $20 billion dollars is fuck you money to those guys. Sorry.
Yeah, when there's this much money involved, and the dynamics are such: it's happened before and it will happen again. All the strategy thinkers at Adobe, Apple, RIM, Google, and Microsoft have learned the lessons from mistakes made by Apple and IBM in launching, and letting platform be marginalized or wrested by a thir
no rational defense? (Score:4, Informative)
I can think of one - stability.
If they dont keep control of development of applications, then it will become a nightmare where they will be blamed for every bad app. To the user, the app is the device, and the device is the app.. they dont know the difference and apple gets the blame.
So, keeping tight reigns on this helps keep that risk at a minimum.
Re: (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.
Re:Revenge (Score:4, Insightful)
In the real world, Safari (including on Mac OS X) only has around 5% market share. That's not ubiquitous at all. I think 'irrelevant' is the word you're looking for.
Re: (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.
Re:Revenge (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Everything I've read about that is that Apple blindsided Adobe on the change. Adobe found out when everyone else did -- when Apple announced it. It's kinda hard to blame Adobe for the delay when Apple didn't even tell them about it ahead of time. A former Adobe Mac developer has already posted the same info [slashdot.org] in an earlier thread. (It's anonymous coward so take it as you may, but I have read the same thing other places in the past so I believe it.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Photoshop is at such an advanced state, that nobody would have a realistic alternative for many many years.
Except for the 90-10 problem. Photoshop may be a long way ahead of the competition, but the more advanced the program is, the fewer people actually need all of the features. Serious graphic designers do, but they're such a tiny proportion of the overall computing market that they don't make a difference in terms of hardware sales. Amateurs are a much larger, although still not huge, proportion, and they can probably manage with version of Photoshop from a decade ago, or any other product that does as muc
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:Surprised? I'm not.. (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who has worked at Adobe and developed on the Mac - trust me - its a labor of love - its not nearly as easy as it is on Windows, Linux and even Solaris.
You don't develop on the Mac because of your insane sales figures on that platform. You don't develop on the Mac because of the tons of developer help they give you. You don't develop on the Mac because they even like you. You do it because ... you always have and you have customers to support.
Good example - they would release a patch on 10.4.x - that would break various things like printing (in minor ways - like custom doc sizes start failing), break drivers that work with our products and on and on and on. They never tested a single thing of ours when releasing anything - despite being their largest 3rd party software developer. We never got a single patch ahead of time - ever - to even do the testing ourselves.
Apple's announcement of Intel OSX caught us blindsighted (we found out the exact same second everyone else did), their announcement of not supporting carbon on 64bit was a surprise (caught mid development of CS4) - especially when they said it would be supported previously.
Radar bugs are a black hole - ask anyone who has filed one.
Compare that with Microsoft. They used to log bugs with us on Vista against things like Acrobat 4 - which we hadn't supported in 8 years. That sort of thing was really really really common. But it shows their commitment to making sure that apps from one of their largest 3rd party vendors ran perfectly on Vista when it shipped. And guess what? Despite all of Vista's issues - everything Adobe ran perfectly.
Microsoft used to pre-emptively notify us when the Windows crash reporter picked up a new problem, including their analysis of the issue. There has been more than one crash report they provided that I've personally seen lead to a bug fix in a patch.
Re:Surprised? I'm not.. (Score:4, Informative)
We never got a single patch ahead of time - ever - to even do the testing ourselves.
I stopped reading here. Either you're a slick troll or Adobe is massively fucking incompetent (I'm not sure which might actually be true and it doesn't really matter). You're seriously claiming Adobe doesn't get the same access to pre-release updates that every other Mac developer gets [apple.com]?
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: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: (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:5, Insightful)
Maybe because they know that Apple would produce a decent alternative to Photoshop for a fraction of the price?
Apple massively undercut Steinberg's Cubase when they released Logic Studio. No lame dongle protection either!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why doesn't Adobe leave Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it is so easy to compete with Photoshop, why isn't anyone doing it and doing it good?
Actually, I'd say Pixelmator is pretty good competition, and one should not ignore Corel's offerings. I don't know anyone with quite as pricey and high-end of an offering, but I bet Apple could buy Pixelmator inexpensively and put some real hurt on Adobe with it in a few years of highly paid development.
Why would Apple succeed where several other have failed?
Apple has the money and the development expertise, especially if Adobe were to step out of the competition by abandoning all those on the Mac platform. Of course Adobe would never do that since it would be pissing off half of their customer base and losing them a pile of money (and probably get the CEO fired).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
my boss told me "the IT department would probably junk punch him" if I did.
I suppose you must like your boss then, because for most people, that'd just be further incentive to jailbreak it.
Re:Isn't this business-101 ? (Score:4, Insightful)
BS.
All Apple has to do is say that all apps released have to pass all their multitouch UI requirements. As far as I can tell they already do this.
Even requiring that the apps call the apple specific APIs when using gestures would be fine. The devs can work with that. Requiring all the devs that want to write iPhone apps to learn and write in apples crappy little language is pure asinine.
Re:Isn't this business-101 ? (Score:4, Insightful)
* Apple have invested a huge amount of effort in getting UIKit up and running. They think they've got the best interface out there for touch.
Apple hasn't mandated the use of UIKit so this point is pretty moot. Lot's of developers port desktop C apps to the iphone, particularly games and there is no requirement to use UIKit and quality control of native iphone Apps is nearly non-existant.
* If Adobe (or whomever) want to produce cross-platform build tools (ie: write for one platform, target another), they can only target the lowest common denominator of all those platforms or provide spotty coverage.
If the apps are crap and unpopular and don't bring anything to the party why would Apple be worried?
* Even if they do provide coverage for everything in Cocoa-Touch, when will support arrive ?
When will support arrive in HTML5 for everything in cocoa touch? does that mean apple shouldn't support web based apps?
* If Adobe want to play, they need to bring something that excites the user-base.
Why, is that necessary when they meet all the current ToS, and other companies release crap iphone apps and aren't punished?
Re:Isn't this business-101 ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:as long as it kills flash... (Score:5, Insightful)
Strongly disagree.
Supporting bad long-term over-arching policies because they happen to work towards a small short-term result that you like is really a bad idea. In the end you'll just work against your own actual goals. For instance, presumably you dislike Flash because it is closed, proprietary, non-compliant, resource-intensive, or whatever. But promoting a ridiculous closed ecosystem will just mean that Flash will replaced with something just as closed, proprietary, non-compliant, or whatever.
Just be consistent, and explain exactly what you dislike about Flash, and what you dislike about Apple's policies.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)