Adobe Stops Development For iPhone 497
adeelarshad82 writes "Adobe's principal product manager Mike Chambers announced that Adobe is no longer investing in iPhone-based Flash development. The move comes after Apple put out a new draft of its iPhone developer program license, which banned private APIs and required apps to be written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine. According to Chambers, Adobe will still provide the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5, but the company is not currently planning any additional investments in that feature."
Daring Fireball points out approvingly Apple's rebuttal to the claim that Flash is an open format, however convenient it might be for iPad owners. Related: The new app policy seems to be inconsistently enforced. Reader wilsonthecat writes "Novell have released a new press release in response to Apple's announcement that none-C/C++/Objective-C based iPhone application development breaks their SDK terms. The press release names several apps that have made it past app review process since the new Apple SDK agreement."
Adobe also said... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Adobe also said... (Score:4, Funny)
"Despite what their Facebook status says, we broke up with Apple first."
LIKE
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I was never really into Farmville and Mafia wars, but I don't think they use flash.
I mean, I know there are lots of games that DO use flash on Facebook, but the biggest ones I can recall don't. Maybe jetman or whatever it was called.
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I was never really into Farmville and Mafia wars, but I don't think they use flash.
My wife and her 5 fake accounts beg to differ. Farmville is a Flashbeast.
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Farmville is definitely a flash game. I had to install flash for farmville when I was trying to get my fiance to use Ubuntu in an ultimately vain attempt at preventing a virus box from being on my network.
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Not sure about mafia wars, maybe in a few places it uses flash but that is mainly HTML-based. If flash is used there it's for eye candy and not functionality.
Farmville is fill-blown flash. Cafe World and others from Zynga use Flash. Zynga really is the big flash game developer on facebook. They rely on it a lot.
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In the last couple weeks, I've chatted with folks that play such games, and all of them based their purchase of the iPhone based upon their ability to play their facebook games 24/7 (at any hour of the day).
Your friends are poor researchers because the iPhone and iPod Touch have never supported Flash. That's why the iPad flap was always so funny to me. It could be summarized as "Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
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In the last couple weeks, I've chatted with folks that play such games, and all of them based their purchase of the iPhone based upon their ability to play their facebook games 24/7 (at any hour of the day).
Your friends are poor researchers because the iPhone and iPod Touch have never supported Flash.
I knew they would be bad researchers when I heard they wanted to play Facebook games 24/7.
...he says while posting to Slashdot...
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This! (Where are mod points when I need them?)
Apple has always been very clear about not allowing non-native frameworks on the iPhone OS - they've disallowed all interpreted code since the introduction of the first SDK (no Java, Flash, .Net, and so forth). Adobe tried to pull an end run by precompiling the Flash - and Apple said no. Bitchy and controlling perhaps, but not unexpected in the least. Anyone who pinned their hopes or business on this was a fool.
What I've wondered throughout all of this is what A
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And that's exactly why I reserve the right to dislike the iPod, iPhone or iPad, on the grounds that I want a _computer_, not a passive propaganda consumption device which disallows the user from programming it.
Re:Adobe also said... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should Apple, as a hardware vendor, permit you to commoditize its profitable hardware in order for you to create software that will help sell other hardware vendor's handsets?
You seem to think all these different vendors give you these tools because they like you or something. Apple gives you tools so you can make apps that make people wanna buy iDevices. Anything you can do that doesn't necessarily drive hardware sales, they're going to fight very hard against. Adobe tries to make its Flash player as cheap and available as possible to drive demand for its authoring products. Anything that makes it possible to author rich web content outside of the Adobe ecosystem they're going to fight very hard against. Thus the two companies find themselves at crossed purposes here.
Apple doesn't want people to write apps that run on multiple OSs, because it will drive commoditization of the handset hardware. Adobe doesn't want people to be able to create rich web animations with anything but its products, because it will drive commoditization of the authoring software. It's really just that simple.
This is different. (Score:5, Informative)
Your friends are poor researchers because the iPhone and iPod Touch have never supported Flash. That's why the iPad flap was always so funny to me. It could be summarized as "Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
You don't understand what just happened between Adobe and Apple, then.
Apple's said plenty of times that it won't support Flash as an interpreter/runtime on the iPhone. I think everybody understood that.
What happened here is that Adobe took them at their word, and did something totally different: they wrote a compiler which takes content written using CS5 and targets *Apple's* runtime. FLA file in, iPhone Binary out. Not SWF, iPhone Binary. Doesn't need the Flash Player to run. Apple wouldn't have had to do a damn thing to "support" these applications.
So Apple changed their license terms and banned apps from the store that were created by another toolchain to target Apple's runtime.
And, for good measure, they also banned apps that are made by targeting Apple's tool chain from another language. So that way, Adobe knows they can't decide to build a version of Flash that takes a FLA file and emits an XCode project that's ready to build.
Of course, that means you can't do something like write in Scheme that compiles to C [jlongster.com], either. Or for that matter, generate any code, really. If you're going to target the iPhone, you'll write all your C, C++, and Objective C code by hand like a real man, buster, and you'll like it.
We're talking about iPhone apps. (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand exactly what happened; I just don't care.
And in turn, I don't care that you don't care. I do care, however, that you made a post that indicates and propogates misunderstanding about the matter.
"Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
Perhaps you should stop posting on the topic until you can bring yourself to care enough to make statements that are accurate.
And I still stand by my assertion that buying a iPhone for the explicit purpose of running Flash apps is a fundamentally bad decision.
We're not talking about Flash apps. We're talking about iPhone apps.
Half of a good point, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
So what happens when Apple needs to change an API and it breaks everyone's $6000 CS5 suite and every app that was compiled with it?
Apple's changes to its mobile platform are going to break a desktop app?
Okay, I don't know what you're smoking there, but let's address the idea of concerns about forward direction of the platform and third-party compilers.
First of all, if we're talking about the APIs, particularly the documented APIs, then Adobe's compiler isn't going to have a problem that every iPhone app is
Re:Adobe also said... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, pro-Flash and anti-Apple people talk as though Flash is a stable and established standard component of any mobile platform, and has been for years.
This, ladies and gents, is the perfect example of a straw man.
While the rest of what you say is actually very spot on, I think you are forgetting that the implication here is that no one can package technology for anyone else to run on an iPhone. I could never create a library or SDK or what-have-you for you to include in your iphone binary if it has any hinf of interacting with another language at any statge.
Apple's controlling nature and hatred for Flash is causing significant collateral damage and sets a terrible precedent with regards to respect for developers.
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The problem is, as far as Apple's concerend, it has the potential to draw people to phones that aren't the iPhone.
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Hallelujah! (Score:2)
In all seriousness this is the best news I've heard all week. After having put up with Adobe's terrible Flash implementations on the Mac, I'm ecstatic that I won't have to put up with what would have been an even worse iPhone implementation.
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flash is not speedy on windows either, but the fan starts up on my laptop anytime i access flash content. it's like it's hard coded into the flash client to heat up the CPU and start up the fan
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I don't understand this - my laptop (2.2 ghz core 2 duo) seems to use around 15% of the cpu watching videos on hulu in HD. At work I tested it with a Dell Optiplex 745 (pizza box style pc) - same thing. Neither machine does the fan speed up or anything.
Neither of these two machines are all that new - I think the 745 is a 4-5 year old pc.
Re:Hallelujah! (Score:4, Informative)
Get a Macintosh.
I have a MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz, 2 GB of RAM. It's 2 years old, and doesn't support GPU help decoding video (it's a GeForce 8600M GT). Someone at my work was questioning why I think Flash is so evil, today I was able to show them. I watched three videos today. Let's compare the experiences.
Now not all YouTube videos are that bad, for some reason that particular video was just really bad. Many small videos like that will only use 30-50% of both cores. Even smaller videos will have occasional hiccups where it will drop 2 frames. 480p videos will usually use up a good chunk of my CPU (~80%), and 720p videos can drop frames when a lot changes in the scene (like a pan). If I change from Flash to HTML5 video (MPEG4), 720p stuff plays back no problem. OK Go's recent video of a Rube Goldberg machine? My Mac can't play it reliably in Flash at 480p without dropping frames when a lot of action is going on.
It's not just videos, although that's where I usually run into it. Flash sites with animation just suck down CPU, little games can really heat up my Mac. I think the problem is the way Flash displays things, but that's just a hunch.
If you know anyone with a Mac (the older the better), go play around with Flash content. It's almost impressive how poorly it performs. Faster and faster Macs help cover it up, but that's no excuse. I'm pretty sure that I could have played Flash content through Parallels at the same or lower CPU usage, but I don't have Parallels installed anymore to test with.
If Adobe spent any time optimizing Flash on OS X, people wouldn't hate it nearly as much. Apple would still hate it (Steve likes control), but people wouldn't have the "kill it now" attitude.
Re:Hallelujah! (Score:4, Insightful)
Everytime someone complains that Flash is terrible on Linux, I have to remind people that Flash is just terrible on every platform.
Re:Why bypass the OS??? (Score:5, Informative)
Read the up on the problems VLC and others have on OSX. Yes the APIs are there, but they DON'T ACTUALLY WORK!
Flash, VLC and the rest don't need direct hardware access on OSX, just playback APIs that aren't crippled.
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On the Mac? Sure. On the iPhone however this would ultimately lead to a Flash plugin for Safari, at which point you'd be trapped on the animated, audible, CPU-eating hellhole that is the modern Internet without the ability to use Flashblock/AdBlock.
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Re:Hallelujah! (Score:5, Informative)
animated, audible, CPU-eating hellhole
HTML5 authoring tools will bring this to your iPhone.
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without the ability to use Flashblock/AdBlock.
No problem, just install Firefox.
Oh, iPhone? never mind.
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"If you could use one codeset to write an app for the iPhone/Android/WinMo/WebOS then how is the iPhone special?"
Precisely. It would have the same, boring, least-common-denominator apps as everything else. Further, Apple must now wait for Adobe to integrate changes into Flash to support new features and new hardware, assuming that Adobe ever gets around to doing so at all. And if the iPhone has new capabilities and the rest of the phones on the market do not, do you think Adobe is going to code them in just
Hilarity (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be very funny if Adobe, just for spite, decided to stop making it's high end graphic design products compatible with Apple hardware. And figured out a way to make them not work via virtualization on Apple hardware as well.
I know, I know, they are publicly traded & would never cut off that revenue stream.
Re:Hilarity (Score:5, Funny)
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It would probably work about as well as MS deciding not to develop IE for the Mac any more or Adobe's earlier decision to skip development of Premiere for the Mac. Apple would just buy some company and put out their own version that would not only work but work the way they wanted
Re:Hilarity (Score:5, Funny)
Which, considering most of the complaints against Gimp are about its user interface, sounds right up Apple's alley.
But when has Apple ever taken an open-source project, cleaned it up with bugfixes and lots of other improvements, and put a proprietary wrapper around it for ease-of-use?
Re:Hilarity (Score:4, Funny)
iWhoosh...
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"All these people use Adobe software all the time as they're photographers videographers or graphic designers."
It is even more funny, that many of these designers are designing Flash media.
Re:Hilarity (Score:5, Insightful)
Photoshop.
Yeah, if there was no Photoshop for Mac, millions of designers would ditch the foremost image edit suite in the world for what, exactly? Or would they ditch Mac? "Adobe screwed", indeed... *eyeroll*
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If Adobe saw the potential in Linux, they could truly be scary.
Imagine an Ubuntu-based distro with Gnome + AWM + a nice window theme and an optimized version of Bridge as the file manager.
Sell this all pre-configured as a complete solution that can work on your current Mac or PC out of the box, no additional software needed....or hardware upgrades to buy.
Then imagine Adobe releasing this and realizing that they can also sell white-box hardware with well-supported Nvidia or ATI Video cards, Plenty of memory
I hope (Score:2, Funny)
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actually the latest rumor is that Apple is going to buy AMD
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Great, so the cost of a Mac will be cut in half, from not using those horribly cost-prohibitive Xeon chipsets and processors ?
Or would it go up, because you need three AMD chips to match one Intel's performance ?
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Like say
http://www.apple.com/aperture/ [apple.com]
Pretty amusing, actually. (Score:5, Funny)
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Seeing one closed off, 'play by our rules or gtfo' company, whining about another closed off 'play by our rules or gtfo' company is golden.
Right, and my personal take is that they both offer very seksi very clean UIs and user experiences. It's probably a pissing match between two companies that are concerned about the being the one who controls the de facto look and feel. Because when you're in control of that situation, you're situated to make a handsome profit. And when you have a proprietary product under the well executed marketing guise of being open then you get to decide who lives and who dies on your platform.
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Okay, I'll bite. In what way is Adobe a "play by our rules or gtfo" company?
Adobe has invoked the anger of Father Steve (Score:4, Insightful)
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They must be banished from the compound and no believer may ever speak with them again.
Father Steve, you have spoken your wish. We shall obey..
Android... (Score:3, Funny)
Adobe is instead focusing on other platforms, namely Android. Chambers said he will personally shift "all of my mobile focus" from the iPhone to Android, and that he has a particular interest in Android-based tablets.
Guess that means we'll be seeing more flash based porn apps [slashdot.org]?
Monotouch's stance (Score:2, Insightful)
Something deeper (Score:2, Insightful)
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I don't think so. I think Apple (and Steve Jobs) are ruthless about killing what they see as legacy tech. And they're pissed at Adobe for dragging their heels in adopting the new Cocoa APIs for UI development.
I think Apple (rightly or wrongly) have decided their mission is to drag the tech world kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Re:Something deeper (Score:4, Informative)
I think Apple (rightly or wrongly) have decided their mission is to drag the tech world kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
...kicking and screaming into their dedicated storefront you mean.
This has nothing to do with whether the iPad runs on fusion and unicorn farts or coal fired steam engines. It's about making sure people can't develop any apps or consume any content that will compete with what you can buy in the App store.
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If that is the case I'm surprised Apple hasn't noticed that every iPod and iPhone seems to have this 'Safari' app on it. Connects to this "internet" thing that you can interact with.
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If that is the case I'm surprised Apple hasn't noticed that every iPod and iPhone seems to have this 'Safari' app on it. Connects to this "internet" thing that you can interact with.
And play Flash games or watch Flash videos?
The internet does not compete with the App Store. Flash does.
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Where were iPhone users supposed to get their apps before the app store? Would it happen to be the internet via Safari? Yes, yes it was. What can you still find on the internet with Safari? Websites that behave like apps. Does Apple control these web apps? No, no they don't.
"It's about making sure people can't develop any apps or consume any content that will compete with what you can buy in the App store." So your assertion is a bit off since there does exist some 'apps' and content that compete with the a
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well to start with Adobe would have to make a special version of flash for the ipad. Since Adobe generally treats anything but the windows version with scorn coming later, and with less features devoting time to keep flash updated on all platforms with reasonable speed requires more developers than adobe is willing to work with.
if Apple decides to do a processor change under the hood. native apps will port quickly but flash would take a year or so before it becomes ready.
Given by year end apple will have
Re:Something deeper (Score:5, Informative)
All your points relate to a completely different issue than what this article is actually about (don't worry, it looks like 99% of the 'techies' posting to this article fail to understand what Adobe actually announced related to Flash and the iPhone).
In short: THIS IS NOT ABOUT FLASH IN THE BROWSER ON THE IPOD/IPHONE/IPAD.
Let me repeat: THIS IS NOT ABOUT FLASH IN THE BROWSER ON THE IPOD/IPHONE/IPAD.
Adobe released a feature that allows you to export an app created in Flash CS5 (not the Flash Player client) as a native iPhone app. This meant you could export an iPhone app that includes ZERO bits of Flash that could then be submitted to Apple's AppStore and appears like every other app.
What Apple said in the their license is, essentially, you must not use 3rd party tools to create native iPhone Apps. XCode and Objective-C are your options.
What Adobe said is that they will no longer work on the above feature for the Apple devices. But will work on it for other devices.
So if you want to create an app that targets the web, the desktop, Android, iPhone, etc. You will be able to target all these platforms with a single code base -- except the iPhone...that you will have to write separately in Objective-C as a completely different code base. Because of Apple's whims.
Note that, according to the license, this also applies to all other non-Apple tools that can be used to cross-compile to a native iPhone app.
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I'd say, yes, it is personal, but here's the backstory [wordpress.com]. Here's the lede:
Personally,
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You're evaluating the situation in relation to short-term sales to end-users, not in relation to the value as a platform. Consider this: one of the biggest disadvantages Apple face is that the vast majority of apps are developed for Windows, not the Mac; and the vast majority of developers are familiar with developing for Windows, not the Mac. Now consider this: the App Store is a huge draw for developers. If developers could build apps for it with Flash, they would just be Flash developers. Instead, t
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If anyone's going to be developing for a locked in closed platform then Apple would rather have it their own instead of Adobe's. If its a matter of developer mind share, Apple wants more people using their crappy incompatible platform because then people are 'stuck' on Apple hardware.
Phase 2 -- Support 'iPhoneOS' apps on Mac's
Phase 3 -- Drop OSX API support for Mac's
Phase 4 -- Drop iTunes support for Windows and prosecute any and everyone who attempts to
Phase 5 -- Own the home PC market
Apple's policy is quite clear (Score:2)
I don't see why people are surprised at this. Just stay out of Ste
Apple is the lesser of two evils here (Score:2, Insightful)
At the end of the day, I've decided to give my grudging approval to what Apple is doing: at least by forcing people into HTML5, they're encouraging the adoption of a fully standards-based i
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by forcing people into HTML5,
This has nothing to do with HTML5. This is about Adobe compiling Flash to objective-C.
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Too bad that would now violate Apples updated license agreement. Which is what Adobe (and others) are kinda miffed about.
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Nope. The bytecode isn't included. There's no Interpreter or JIT present in the final app. The Packager actually compiles the SWF directly into native code. (Assets from the SWF are brought along in data form, of course, but all the code bits are cross-compiled.)
Re:Apple is the lesser of two evils here (Score:4, Interesting)
Except it seems Apple won't be happy until they kill the notion of "general purpose computer" for the masses and each computing "device" sold to the public is a locked down single purpose appliance designed for the consumption of content, all preferably sold by Apple.
I as someone who makes a living from developing software and who generally loves tinkering with computers hate that vision and can not support Apple moving close to it.
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Html-5 is really a convenient scapegoat - if it wasn't that it would be something else, and its not battery life or stability - I think more than one person has put down that myth. The reality is developing applications on html-5 is tricky business still because its still in development, but I'm sure it will get much easier once developer tools arrive and standards are more firmly set.
The reality here is that Flash, like Java would create an end run around the app-store immediately (and their revenue sharin
Is there a downside? (Score:4, Insightful)
What would it take to get Adobe to quit infecting all platforms with their overhyped junk? Yes, yes, people love Photoshop. Just imagine that app, though, rewritten with a modern GUI toolkit and brand new underpinnings so that it wasn't a steaming pile. Now realize that it'll never happen because Apple fanboys have nothing on Adobe advocates and Adobe has no reason to spend development money making it better instead of adding shiny new features. (BTW, I'm not a Gimp fan, either - it's fully possible to dislike both apps on their own demerits.)
While I'm not a huge fan of Jobs, I sincerely thank him for driving a stake into Flash's corrupted heart. Would that the rest of Adobe's hoggish wares die with it.
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Well Apple already wanted Adobe to completely rewrite Photoshop in Objective C instead of maintaining it in a cross-platform language. They didn't do this, so now Mac gets the worse version.
Poor, poor Adobe. They only had a decade to port the Photoshop GUI to ObjC, C, or C++ [apple.com] - the languages supported by Cocoa. Again, I'm not a big Apple fan. While they make some neat stuff, they do plenty of screwy things that make me not want to deal with them. Still, it's hard to sympathize in any way with Adobe's positions in this war.
Daring Fireball (Score:2)
Anyone else think it's hilarious how John Gruber is pouting about Gizmodo and the iPhone 4 leak? It's like he's a six-year-old who was just told by a drunk uncle that Santa and the Tooth Fairy are actually just his parents. "I want my sense of childlike wonder back! **waaaaaaaah!**
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Had almost enough of this (Score:2)
Apple: When will it end? (Score:2)
This is ominous to the iPhone user. Next I expect to hear that ActiveX and Real will be booted from the iPhone, and then we'll never get anything done. The iPhone simply doesn't support ALL of the web.
And it doesn't stop there. I bet that MS-Office macros will be considered a programming language, and then will be booted off ot the Mac!
This is the END! I'm tired of these control games.
This whole battle is missing so many details (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, Apple could just be trying to do away with it, hoping HTML 5 takes more hold.
And they didn't see this coming? (Score:2, Funny)
Direct quote from Mike Chambers: "Because this is Flash, it is rather trivial to port games created with Flash that target the iPhone to target other operating systems, such as Android."
Which pretty much sums up the entire reason for 3.3.1. Did they seriously expect that, going in with this offering, they'd get no pushback from Apple? It's been abundantly clear from day one that the iPhone store is a closed platform, subject to the business ideals of Apple (i.e. make Apple more money). Any sane iPhone devel
To quote (Score:5, Insightful)
When your enemies are fighting. Don't interrupt them.
Worst title EVER. (Score:2)
Seriously, "no longer investing in iPhone-based Flash development" is not even close to the same thing as "Adobe Stops Development For iPhone."
If Microsoft tryed to pull this (Score:2, Informative)
Interesting scenario (Score:2, Insightful)
It is really interesting to see Adobe and Apple not getting along. For as long as I can remember the primary users of Apple hardware were "creative professionals". All of those users were using Apple because of Photoshop and the various other Adobe tools. Even when Adobe put their tools out for Windows, 99% of the creative professionals preferred to continue using them on Apple hardware. In much the same way that people claim, "I have a Windows box to play games on.", others would claim, "I have a Mac t
Re:Interesting scenario (Score:4, Informative)
It's because Adobe really hasn't done much for Apple lately. I might be out of the loop because I use gimp for mac [gimp.org] full time now, but as far as I know Adobe never actually ported Photoshop to become a cocoa app. This [tuaw.com] is another bad problem: no 64 bit for macs, only windows. And that's been the Mac user's cross to bear for a long time now, companies like Adobe (or Bungie) that used to focus on the mac platform have made the calculation that when one OS manufacturer owns 90% of the market (MS), even if all of the remaining people buy their products, it's still only 10% of the total base and more sales could be had by focusing on the monopoly OS. In the past Apple had to bend over and take it. Now they don't. As a guy who started using macs in 1997, all I have to say is: Revenge is sweet. I hate flash anyway, slow as molasses.
Apple slows down innovation on all fronts (Score:3, Insightful)
The only reason Apple is doing this is to keep its store's apps, music, and video selling. If there was Flash, everybody would just play Flash games and stream Flash music and video -- just like they do on PCs.
But even after all of this grief it will mean nothing. Once web technologies evolve the web will be a foundation for apps, music, and video. Just like with Flash today but under a different name. Apple's store will just be a steaming pile. And for what? A few years of having your customers locked into your content?
The only result is slowing down innovation of the web. Unless you call moving to an open technology with none of the features 'innovation'. Nice job Apple.
It wouldn't be a problem if Apple developed an open technology to replace Flash. But they wouldn't do that because it would kill their store.
Re:Apple slows down innovation on all fronts (Score:4, Insightful)
From where I sit, html5 is the innovation and the future of the web here, flash is holding innovation up because it's being forced to do things it was never designed to do. Apple is pushing the world forward by releasing us fro relying on a plugin that relies on a single manufacturer, i.e., Adobe.
Fanboy spittle at 3 o'clock (Score:3, Insightful)
Flash is where most of the content is on the web. Like it or not, you have to deal with that. Apple is not going to force all the existing content into HTML 5 so kindly stop with the incoherent fanboy ranting. Content is far more important then innovation, I can list a dozen innovations that went nowhere because they were too incompatible.
and clean the froth off your keyboard.
The GP is 100% right, as soon as flash is availa
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I certainly agree - and have argued several times - that Apple has the right to decide what kind of apps they want the iPod and iPad to run. Generally this is my response to OSS philosophers who want to paint any restriction as somehow immoral and inherantly damaging to users' "rights" and "freedom".
But to say "who cares" is a little much. Anyone who wants to understand the current and prospective feature set of the iPad, iPod, or iPhone - because, I don't know, maybe they are deciding whether to buy one
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
This has nothing to do with the current and prospective feature set of the iPad, iPod Touch, or iPhone. It relates only to the features available to the developers on those systems. This article does not discuss Flash in a browser or embedded web content, but rather Flash as a development environment that can be compiled down to native iPhoneOS binaries. So it really only matters to developers of existing Flash games who want to port their content to the iPhone easily. Given the market share of the App Store in the mobile space, though, my guess is it won't put much of a dent in app availability, and thus not affect end-users at all.
the hard lesson of photoshop and Acrobat (Score:4, Informative)
Before apple switched to Intel, they warned developers they ought to stick to the cocoa coding guidelines uber strictly. Those that apps that did were nearly just a recompile away from being native fat binaries for intel/ppc after switch.
Adobe took over 2 years to release native photoshop and acrobat readers. The only reason those apps even ran was because Apple had purchased the company Rosetta to make an emulator. If no emulator had existed then they would have lost photoshop!! Even then graphic arts folks were not thrilled to be having to retain their PPC computers just to run native.
You can see why apple would not want to have an adobe flash layer running apps on the iphone. Assuming adobe did not update the flash player for two years, apps would not even run on the platform switch. There might not be a suitable emulator that could run on a resource starved iphone.
Apple would lose a lot of apps. Consumers would be confused. And Developers would blame apple for the platform switch going so ugly.
Now is it reasonable to presume that Adobe is not using Xcode to develope their apps? yes. One might even speculate they are using adobe AIR or some other cross platform API since their apps run on many more platforms than xcode supports.
Why bet the farm on adobe's good will when they screwed apple over photoshop and Acrobat
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I'm sure it has nothing to do with the online video race, for which Apple has been competing with Microsoft and Real for since the beginning. Adobe kicked all their asses because Flash let you customize the look and functionality of your player with a full programming language. Want a big fat button that goes right back to your web site? No problem.
Looks like Apple still hasn't learned the lesson.
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Apple promote HTML 5 which also lets you have a custom look and feel to your player, whilst using the built in codecs with hardware acceleration. What was that lesson you had in mind?
Re:the hard lesson of photoshop and Acrobat (Score:5, Informative)
Btw here's what one of the photoshop engineers said about the switch to intel based Macs: http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/03/macintosh_and_t.html [adobe.com]
Here's another quote from the Photoshop Product manager (John Nack) in 2008:
No one has ever ported an application the size of Photoshop from Carbon to Cocoa (as I mentioned earlier, after 9 years as an Apple product Final Cut Pro remains Carbon-based), so we’re dealing with unknown territory.
...
1) Writers gin up controversy about Apple vs. Adobe, portraying this as a case of some tit-for-tat ("This one time, Steve wouldn't play golf with Shantanu, so Adobe is sulking!"). Oh, come on. This is why Lightroom x64 is a such a nice counterpoint: Adobe's decisions are pragmatic, not ideological. Look, Apple and Adobe share the goal of maximizing Photoshop performance on Mac hardware, and we're working together on all aspects of that story--64-bit included.
"If it bleeds, it leads," however, and writers looking to drive ad impressions will try to fabricate a grudge match. Please don't let them.
2) Adobe gets castigated for "dragging its feet" on Cocoa/x64. This charge will be inevitable, I suppose, but I want you to know that we started work on the problem immediately after WWDC '07. We started peeling senior engineers off the CS4 effort, and we'll keep pouring on the muscle in the next cycle. This work comes at the expense of other priorities, but so be it.
3) We start hearing all about "Cocoa Über Alles"--about how Adobe should have known that Cocoa is the One True Way and should have started the move years ago. Most Mac users don't know Cocoa from Ovaltine, and nor should they: it's just an implementation detail, not a measure of quality. I think Brent Simmons, creator of wonderful Cocoa apps like NetNewsWire, put it most elegantly: "Finder + Cocoa = Finder." That is, rewriting one's app in Cocoa doesn't somehow automatically improve its speed, usability, or feature set.
I'll also note that Apple's Carbon Web site says, "Carbon is a set of APIs for developing full-featured, high-performance, and reliable applications for Mac OS X... The Carbon APIs are also well-suited to cross-platform development." I don't mention it to detract from Cocoa; I mention it to point out that each approach has its pros and cons, and in hopes that we don't hear all about how Cocoa is clearly the only way to write "real" Mac software.
Read more here: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/04/photoshop_lr_64.html [adobe.com]
This whole cocoa vs carbon drama is stupid. It seems only to suffice as some PR dig from Apple fanboys against Adobe. Or some shit-stirring controversy for tech blogs to get hits or slashdotters to whore karma. Anyone who has used Adobe apps professionally on mac in the past ten years knows at no time were they ever not available on Macs.
Nobody screwed anybody. It's just what happens when platforms change.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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Sort of. It's a kinda goofy dialect of C with objects tacked on. They borrow some Smalltalk idioms and pepper the mixture with a generous helping of unnecessary brackets and parentheses.
Personally, I think C++ is just as messy so I call it a draw.
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It's basically good old K&R C with a bit of Smalltalk-inspired object syntax on top of it. It is not as much as dumbed down as rather not dumbed up.
Re:Next step... (Score:4, Interesting)
Next step? It's not like Adobe hasn't already been doing this for years. They canceled Framemaker for Mac despite it being a better seller on the Mac than PC. They killed Premiere but that was after Apple came out with FCP since Premiere on the Mac sucked so bad. Then putting out Lightroom after Apple came out with Aperture. Even Flash. They really haven't done anything with it on the Mac side since they got it from Macromedia. Development has been lagging on the Mac side (and even worse for Linux). Perhaps if Adobe had been paying attention to it and actually supporting it, Apple might not have decided they didn't want it so quickly.
For that matter, it's not like they have a real copy of Flash for any phone yet, let alone the iPhone. Even if Apple hadn't had prevented it, there's no real garantee it would be anything but vaporware yet. At best, there would be some Lite version that wouldn't do much and whose performance would lag behind even the Linux version of Flash. My suggestion to Adobe is that if they really want Flash as an iApp, then concentrate on the Android OS. Put out a really good version of Flash for that platform, show that it can work, and that it isn't going to be some half assed job, then maybe Apple will reconsider, especially if it becomes a selling point for the Droid.
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Aperture came out in December 2006. Lightroom was available to the public 6 weeks later, mid January 2007. I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that Lightroom was a response to Aperture - I somehow think it had been in development for a bit more than a month (indeed, prototypes were in software form in 2003).
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You joke but imagine this press release: "Adobe announced today that it's CS suite will no longer support OSX."
Never gonna happen but man I'd pay to see the jaws drop. OSX has made great progress as far as the software pool it has. But for a while Adobe was keeping them on life support IMHO.
Re:Does anyone care about Flash on the iPhone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly.
People don't care about Flash, and they don't care about an open app store. The iPhone does what they want it to do.
I don't care that I had to mod my original X-Box so that I could run XBMC, watch DVDs without buying the remote, or backup my games to run off the harddrive. At the time of the purchase, I was aware of the features (and limitations) of what I was buying. I have an iPhone and don't want an Android. I use the web browser to look up things randomly, IMDB movies, listen to Pandora, etc. What am I missing out on? If I need anything else, I have a perfectly capable desktop and laptop.
I'm not trying to flame, can someone answer: What kind of apps do you use on the Android that aren't available on the iPhone, but are so important that you have to use them immediately, and can't wait until you're back on a desktop/laptop? (But of course if you can answer that question, then buy an Android, ignore the iPhone and move on)
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I'm not trying to flame, can someone answer: What kind of apps do you use on the Android that aren't available on the iPhone, but are so important that you have to use them immediately, and can't wait until you're back on a desktop/laptop? (But of course if you can answer that question, then buy an Android, ignore the iPhone and move on)
I can't answer your question because I've ignored the iPhone, bought an Android, and moved on.
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Don't go making the mistake of thinking that anything that happens on Slashdot is relevant to or important in the real world. Some of it might be, but not most of it.