Will Adobe Sue Apple Over Flash? 980
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's iron-bound determination to keep Adobe Flash out of any iWhatever device is about to blow up in Apple's face. Sources close to Adobe tell me that Adobe will be suing Apple within a few weeks."
Sue Apple Over Flash? (Score:2, Informative)
If this is Adobe's attempt to get on to the iPlatform they'll be shooting themselves in the foot.
Suing them for what, exactly? (Score:3, Informative)
Granted, ianal (but neither is Jack Thompson!) but I am just totally baffled as to what grounds the alleged suit is being brought on.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:4, Informative)
Do you know what a monopoly is? how can you possibly claim Apple has a monopoly in either one of those markets? most figures I've seen put them in the 15-20% market share for smartphones, and those numbers are probably high.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It would be cheaper to fix the damned product. (Score:3, Informative)
And to be honest, I have never seen a complaint about one of our iPhone apps written in MonoTouch (and we have several complex ones) - people cannot notice the difference between one and a native app.
Re:It would be cheaper to fix the damned product. (Score:2, Informative)
same thing happens to me with iTunes on PC. Download a single track and CPU jumps to 100% - this is a well known issue that has remained unfixed for at least the last 3 years
Re:..and as I said on a previous thread. (Score:5, Informative)
It's very good, except that it's wrong. Apple did know about the iPhone packager, of course (there are approved apps in the AppStroe built with the prerelease versions of it, and Adobe has been bragging about it for a while) - and they did nothing to hint they would prevent it, up till the very last second.
(banning "interpreted code" does not count, the iPhone packager did not create interpreted code)
Re:apple needs to be sued over there app store loc (Score:3, Informative)
Yep, I was in the same boat. I now just use a Cowon D2+ instead since it plays nice with pretty much everything via both USB-MSC and MTP.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:1, Informative)
Is there a way both of them can lose?
Yes [wikipedia.org]
Re:Lord of War Quote (Score:3, Informative)
I know the difference, it's still early and Coffee hasn't arrived yet. It happens.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, since Apple are pushing for H.264 video (which they part own the patents to AFAIK) in HTML5 you could say that they're offering a competing product.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:4, Informative)
The relationship between Adobe and Apple has been somewhat strained. Adobe for the most part made their name with Photoshop on Mac. Over the years they have slowly shifted their main focus to PC products instead and then going porting these products back to Mac. This is most evident with the Cocoa API Framework. Apple first released the APIs with OS X back in 2001. Up until CS5 was released on Monday, Adobe didn't use the API framework and instead relied on the Carbon Framework. That's 9 years to move frameworks. CS5 is also the first to be 64 bit as well. Apple might be a little tired of Adobe dragging its feet on development.
Re:..and as I said on a previous thread. (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry Adobe, you screwed yourself [wordpress.com]. Adobe's threw the first punch.
They drug their feet OS X and Intel. Way back in the day they told Apple users that Windows was their #1 platform and they were planning on releasing everything for it first.
This was back in the day when Apple looked like it wasn't going to be around much longer. Adobe took a gamble and no one could have predicted that Apple would be back like they are.
Adobe has gave PPC users (from 68k), OS X users (non-rosetta), Intel users, Premiere users, Flash users the finger.
Adobe made a wrong bet in 1996 and is suffering the consequences in 2010 and has no one to blame except themselves. It’s Adobe’s turn to show that it matters to Apple and the tech industry. I don’t remember Apple or Steve Jobs whining in 1996-2006 about Adobe not contributing to the Apple ecosystem.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:5, Informative)
Feb 2010 Smartphone Market share [arstechnica.com]
Re:WTF Slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, not really.
"Some anonymous guy" is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and he's a regular writer for IT World.
And the anonymous submitter would appear to be one "smlynch" according to the URL to TFA. Sure, it's not much, but it's not exactly anonymous.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:4, Informative)
Rather than Adobe dragging their feet, Apple fucked them over when they released developer docs for Carbon 64 and then later cancelled the entire API without any explanation. The Mac Zealot idea that there was some sort of roadmap or plan to transition everyone to Cocoa is simply factually incorrect. Apple just spontaneously did it and without warning their major development shops (even internally).
And I don't see how developers wasting their time with platform churn rather than adding new features and improving the product helps anyone. The platform-purity argument is bunk - the programs really aren't any better for using Cocoa as far as anyone can tell.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:3, Informative)
Woosh...
That was his point by way of sarcasm. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the mobile phone market, or even the smartphone market, and as such are not held to the same standards as a convicted monopolist (like Microsoft in the operating system market).
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, Microsoft can.
Windows Phone 7 Series is Silverlight/C# only. In fact, I believe that you can only use .Net framework now for WinMo apps, they ditched the old tool chain (Visual C++).
Re:Lord of War Quote (Score:3, Informative)
The iPhone OS *does* use QuickTime (the framework) to play movies and music. Hell, an MP4 container (as defined in MPEG4 Part 14) is a subset of the QuickTime MOV format. 3GP (as used on many cellphones) is also a subset of the MOV container.
Of course, the only codecs that ship with the iPhone OS support AVC (MPEG4 Part 10), AAC and MP3 - not the many common other ones that ship with QuickTime on MacOS. But I haven't seen any video play only on the iPhone and not say, iTunes (which uses QuickTime).
Remember, MOV is just a container, It can contain many streams, most of which won't play on an iPhone. You're left with supporting the ones that the QuickTime for the iPhone supports.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:2, Informative)
Some Android Phones already have an embedded Flash player, for example the HTC Hero [htc.com]. I think that flash player 10.1 for Android devices will be the version installable on other devices and not factory installed
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:2, Informative)
You are correct, the issue has little to do with monopolies. This battle is over restraint of trade:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restraint_of_trade [wikipedia.org]
Apple is deliberately and artificially limiting Adobe's presence in the marketplace. I think Adobe has a case.
But Adobe has their own monopoly problem. With 95% of the internet video market they might have a hard time proving that that they aren't abusing their monopoly position with the lawsuit.
captcha: enmity
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:3, Informative)
I'm constantly amazed at how many people aren't familiar with the term "Vertical monopoly." It's not commonly enforced, but that's exactly what Apple aspires to, and it's one of the many reasons they should be smacked down.
Re:"It's Apple's device" (Score:5, Informative)
incorrect. [wikipedia.org]
You don't need 100% of a market to have a monopoly.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:5, Informative)
I think this goes a long way beyond html5 video.
The newest release of Flash can apparently generate iPhone compatible applications. Apple rewrote their developer terms that require you to write your iPhone apps to run directly on the platform using a spcified language (i.e. objective C, C, C++ or Javascript). Using a cross-compiler to develop an application is prohibited.
This would have been a big market for flash, Apple have closed it off for no apparent reason other than to spite Adobe.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:1, Informative)
HTC has been including Flash support in their Android devices since the Hero.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:5, Informative)
Apple itself doesn't use hardware acceleration (except on the 9400M chipset, and even then only very recently) for things like H.264.
Flash on Windows doesn't use hardware acceleration either (10.1 will), and the performance is better than the OS X version.
All of the graphics components of OS X are documented and other third party vendors seem to have no problems.
On2 even had a decent flash player built into its own app (used to use it to test flash videos with simple player templates that the software would make for you if you gave it a source video - it was much better than the flash plugin for the browser!)
Perhaps Adobe should have started here: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/GS_GraphicsImaging/ [apple.com]
just like everyone else who wants to build something that displays something on the screen. I'll give you another hint: "nothing aside from blessed quicktime components can actually use video acceleration" is bullshit. Have you even read the documentation?
You have full (and extremely well documented) access to the graphics abilities of OS X as a developer.
The complaints about "acceleration" are almost all related to the lack of hardware decoding of H.264 in OS X, which is limited to the Nvidia 9400M chipset only. Even "blessed" Quicktime doesn't use hardware decoding of H.264 on OS X (unless you have a Mac with a 9400M). Hopefully this will be added soon.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:2, Informative)
Also if they let flash on the platform that means flash /flex apps would work on the the Android phones and the iPhone equally. They don't want that competition either they want developers locked in to their app ecosystem and make it difficult and or expensive for them to develop cross platform mobile titles.It's all bout control money and lock in. It's good business but it's anti competitive, predatory, and anti consumer.
So Apple prefers HTML5 over Flash. Nothing is stopping the rush to move online games over to HTML5 instead. HTML5 is not locked into Apple, it's open and will work on Android phones equally. So what's your point?
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:4, Informative)
Apple made a hard decision to cut support for a legacy framework, with broad impact to many of its developers. This very trait is often lauded in comparisons to Microsoft, where many people would dearly love for terrible legacy frameworks and APIs to be deprecated (or even just 'nuked from orbit'). Moreover, Apple isn't obligated to do any work to make Adobe's life easier.
If you want to continue silly tit-for-tat analyses of such things, Adobe screwed Apple over a decade earlier by refusing to port anything to Cocoa -- sticking with Carbon in the first place. This Roughly Drafted article [roughlydrafted.com] provides more of the historical color.
Re:I'm conflicted (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, since Apple are pushing for H.264 video (which they part own the patents to AFAIK)
Well, Apple and 25 other organizations [mpegla.com], including Microsoft and Sony. Sorry if that takes some of the fun out of your speculation.