Apple Blocks Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone Compiler in Latest SDK Agreement

[SactoGuy18]

I think if Apple doesn't back down very soon, Adobe will file an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and may just announce all further work on its Creative Suite products for MacOS X have been halted. Let's see how fast Apple (and very likely Mac users!) start to panic as the most commonly-used graphics tools for the Mac--PhotoShop and Illustrator--will no longer be available and Mac users scramble for alternatives.

Given how stable Windows 7 is nowadays and Adobe still supporting Windows, that could right there drive a LOT of people towards switching to high-end PC's running Windows 7 Professional for high-end graphics work.

 

[John.B]

This is how you get the anti-trust investigators breathing down your neck.

Apple has become Micro$oft.

How sad.

Anti-trust is probably the most widely misunderstood area of law in the US.

Apple "becoming Microsoft" would be like Apple telling AT&T they could only sell iPhones, or that they couldn't sell any smartphones with Flash on them, or that an iPhone license would have to be paid to Apple regardless of what mobile OS actually shipped on each one. It just isn't the case. And even that assumes Apple has this huge marketshare that would allow them even to exert that kind of influence. Which also isn't the case.

Apple is only 15% of the smartphone market, hardly what you could call a monopoly. And far less for mobile phones in aggregate (e.g. cheap flip phones):

And while I'm on a soapbox, can we finally dispense with the "$" when spelling Microsoft? It was pretty childish as a 90's meme and it still is today. (For that matter, today's Microsoft actually isn't a whole lot like the one that Bill Gates ran back in 90's.)

 

[firewood]

If that were the case, then it wouldn't be a problem. Use the intermediate code and put that through xcode instead of only supplying the compiled version. Problem solved --- if your explanation is correct, which I doubt.

That's what CS5 does, except they appear to use their own (very similar) object code generator instead of xcode's. if you could get rid of all the (megabytes of) library code which translate all the compiled calls to flash's APIs into compiled calls to iPhone SDK APIs, it would be closer to a non-flash project, but still violate the new 3.3.1. The intermediate translated code would still very likely show up as huge, poorly structured, and obviously not human written.

 

[Hal Itosis]

Is Apple going to provide a rationale for this? I can understand why they won't support Flash player, as it's a resource hog, but if an app is playing by their rules, using their language, why is it unacceptable if it started in another language? Do such apps also drain resources. As a professor that was planning on teaching tools such as Appcelerator and using CS5's new iphone compiler features when it comes out, this is extremely disappointing. I think the least we deserve is a good explanation defending this decision. Someone mentioned that it hurt Apple's business model b/c of the required $99/yr developer fee. Guess what? In order to build and test apps built in those other environments, one must actually purchase a developer's license, so it doesn't hurt their business model in any way.

Please, Apple, provide a reasonable explanation.

The rational is simple.

Steve jobs has a huge log up is rear.

There have been many posts in this thread which provided clear explanations already. Several appeared on page 9 which i chose to highlight in my 2 posts on page 10. Apparently, both of you (staypuffinpc and Rodimus Prime) must be lacking either the balls or the brains to quote those posts and respond directly to their lucid points.

If you're going to totally ignore explanations already provided, and instead post redundant questions (or resort to grade-school banalities), then who exactly do you expect to take you seriously? Sure smells like trollage to me.

Go ahead, just call your opponents "fanboys" and engage in your little melodramas... because apparently there are no technical avenues available with which to resolve your oh-so-tragic circumstance.

If you supposedly care about the iPhone OS, then learn the required language. Else, drink a steaming hot cup of ****.

 

[Compile 'em all]

 

[firewood]

I think if Apple doesn't back down very soon, Adobe will file an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and may just announce all further work on its Creative Suite products for MacOS X have been halted.

Adobe holds a larger market share in browser pluggins than Apple holds in cell phones, so any antitrust scrutiny into this scrum could well backfire and get Adobe into far more trouble themselves.

Plus the Adobe shareholders would quickly fire the executives who were childish enough to throw away well over 10% of their profitable business.

Do you (or your parents) have any of their retirement funds in a mutual fund holding Adobe? Why do you want to throw money away?

 

[AidenShaw]

From AppleInsider:
http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ps_in_iphone_4_0_related_to_multitasking.html



Not sure I believe this though.

-Kevin

I know that I don't believe it. The scheduler should be clueless about the source language. The scheduler parcels out quanta of CPU time to threads that request time.

Whether the app is making API calls from the outer code, or whether the app has a library making the native API calls should be irrelevant.

Any managed OO application is a based on layers of runtimes. Methods call methods call methods - and eventually a native API is called - which calls methods that call methods that....

Either Apple's new multi-tasking APIs are DOA, or someone is making excuses.

 

[John.B]

I think if Apple doesn't back down very soon, Adobe will file an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and may just announce all further work on its Creative Suite products for MacOS X have been halted. Let's see how fast Apple (and very likely Mac users!) start to panic as the most commonly-used graphics tools for the Mac--PhotoShop and Illustrator--will no longer be available and Mac users scramble for alternatives.

Given how stable Windows 7 is nowadays and Adobe still supporting Windows, that could right there drive a LOT of people towards switching to high-end PC's running Windows 7 Professional for high-end graphics work.

See above. Anti-trust isn't what you think it is, it doesn't do what you think it does, and it can't be used the way you think it can.

Even the Flash Blogmeister himself at Adobe says they aren't going to do what you are suggesting (fifth paragraph). For one thing, Mac OSX versions are about half of Adobe's CS revenues and Adobe hasn't been doing all that well lately. Besides, Apple could easily buyout the entire market cap of Adobe with the cash reserves they have on hand today (assuming they'd want to).

 

[LadyHoneyBabe]

The REAL reason Apple kicks Adobe to the curb.

 

[winterspan]

I hope this doesn't kill Unity 3D

Cross-platform development isn't inherently bad. Yes, there are some glorified javascript "cross platform" frameworks that allow someone to write a crappy AJAX'y application and then packaged it for a half-dozen mobile platforms, but there are also some excellent, pragmatic tools.

For those who don't know, Unity 3d (http://unity3d.com/) is a game engine based on an open source version of Microsoft's .NET platform. The people who made it are freakin' geniuses, and developed a cross-compiler and awesome graphics/gaming engine that allows you to write your game in C# and then compile it for iPhone (and other platforms) as a native OpenGL application. The end result is NOT a buggy and slow port, but a polished, high-performance product. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Unity 3D games in the app store already.

This will be a very bad day if Apple's spitefulness keeps thousands of talented independent developers and small teams out of the app store who don't have the time or resources to learn Obj-C/Cocoa and maintain a separate iPhone-only variant of their apps/games.

 

[firewood]

But no language that relies on column numbers for comment detection and line continuation is a real language, so FORTRAN is out.

Interesting comment for someone who probably helped target CPU implementations at the top of the SPECfp rankings, and probably (with sufficient boatloads of cores) some spots on the TOP500 Supercomputing list.

And didn't some academic call C just a PDP-11 macro assembler?

 

[firewood]

For those who don't know, Unity 3d (http://unity3d.com/) is a game engine based on an open source version of Microsoft's .NET platform. The people who made it are freakin' geniuses, and developed a cross-compiler and awesome graphics/gaming engine that allows you to write your game in C# and then compile it for iPhone (and other platforms) as a native OpenGL application. The end result is NOT a buggy and slow port, but a polished, high-performance product.

The minimum footprint still includes megabytes of library support code.

This will be a very bad day if Apple's spitefulness keeps thousands of talented independent developers and small teams out of the app store who don't have the time or resources to learn Obj-C/Cocoa and maintain a separate iPhone-only variant of their apps/games.

The people doing the Lua gamekit might have a case, but C# isn't really that much of an easier language to learn than C/Obj-C. Maybe its memory management requires a bit less competence.

 

[AidenShaw]

And they can accomplish the same thing by using html without the security and performance problems of Flash.

Yes, if you believe that Flash is just a video player. Lots of posts by Flash developers here point out that building a web UI in Flash is simple - where it's difficult to impossible in HTML.

How would anyone know? They're already 3 years late to the party.

Windows users have been partying for those years. Apple users - no, but because Apple shafted their developers by cancelling their announced plans for Carbon64.

Apple Fail, not Adobe Fail.

I was hoping no one noticed BASIC. But no language that relies on column numbers for comment detection and line continuation is a real language, so FORTRAN is out.

I assume that you still have your 029 programming drum?

If you don't, you might have noticed that since Fortran90 free-format Fortran has been standard - no columns.

I also assume, like me, that you hate Python?

 

[JimAtLaw]

The REAL reason Apple kicks Adobe to the curb.

Among others, yes.

Without addressing the technical merits or picking a side, apparently, from a business perspective, Adobe should start offering new versions of its products on Windows & other OS options well before Mac and perhaps free license swaps from Mac to Windows versions (but not the other way around) or other incentives to try and convert people off of the Apple platform, as it seems Apple is going way out of its way to keep Adobe from making money in the iPod/iPad/iPhone ecosystem.

Whatever has happened behind the scenes, this seems to have erupted into an all out war on Adobe on Apple's part (not just this, but time after time - e.g., preemptively fingering Adobe for iMac hardware problems, etc.), so it seems to make business sense for Adobe to try to preserve their user community by helping to migrate them to a platform where Adobe is actually allowed to operate and succeed rather than actively discriminated against.

 

[AidenShaw]

And didn't some academic call C just a PDP-11 macro assembler?

Anyone who's programmed VAX or PDP assembly knows that. (For example, the "--" and "++" ops are PDP-11 (and VAX) operand modifiers.)

The minimum footprint still includes megabytes of library support code.

...which stays in the .ipa file if it isn't used.

Virtual memory management should keep code disk footprint from becoming memory footprint.

 

[cmaier]

Interesting comment for someone who probably helped target CPU implementations at the top of the SPECfp rankings, and probably (with sufficient boatloads of cores) some spots on the TOP500 Supercomputing list.

And didn't some academic call C just a PDP-11 macro assembler?

I got far more of a thrill seeing my CPUs in Fry's and Best Buy than I did hearing about them in the TOP500. But that's just me.

PDP-11, of course, had the increment feature in its ALU ops, giving us the ++ function in C (and the name of C++), so I'm all about the PDP-11 Nonetheless, I will not be tricked. Real languages = assembler + C, C++, Objective-C (and let's throw D in there) plus any other C variation I may not be familiar with. Oh, and Perl.

I assume that you still have your 029 programming drum?

If you don't, you might have noticed that since Fortran90 free-format Fortran has been standard - no columns.

I also assume, like me, that you hate Python?

Sigh. You bastards. I hoped no one would notice that, either. When I coded Fortran no one was using fortran90. Not sure if anyone does now, but if so good for them. Still a crappy language. BASIC without line numbers and with real math operations. (Yes, and I know BASIC doesn't have mandatory line numbers anymore. Sheesh

Python sucks.

 

[AidenShaw]

Sigh. You bastards. I hoped no one would notice that, either.

Great photo from that link (note that the ASCII CRT terminals are about 20 years newer than the card punch).

(click to enlarge)

I assume you haven't tried Fortran 2003 either?

Fortran 2003
The most recent standard, Fortran 2003, is a major revision introducing many new features. A comprehensive summary of the new features of Fortran 2003 is available at the Fortran Working Group (WG5) official Web site.[13]

From that article, the major enhancements for this revision include:

• Derived type enhancements: parameterized derived types, improved control of accessibility, improved structure constructors, and finalizers.
• Object-oriented programming support: type extension and inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic type allocation, and type-bound procedures.
• Data manipulation enhancements: allocatable components (incorporating TR 15581), deferred type parameters, VOLATILE attribute, explicit type specification in array constructors and allocate statements, pointer enhancements, extended initialization expressions, and enhanced intrinsic procedures.
• Input/output enhancements: asynchronous transfer, stream access, user specified transfer operations for derived types, user specified control of rounding during format conversions, named constants for preconnected units, the FLUSH statement, regularization of keywords, and access to error messages.
• Procedure pointers.
• Support for IEEE floating-point arithmetic and floating point exception handling (incorporating TR 15580).
• Interoperability with the C programming language.
• Support for international usage: access to ISO 10646 4-byte characters and choice of decimal or comma in numeric formatted input/output.
• Enhanced integration with the host operating system: access to command line arguments, environment variables, and processor error messages.

An important supplement to Fortran 2003 was the ISO technical report TR-19767: Enhanced module facilities in Fortran. This report provided submodules, which make Fortran modules more similar to Modula-2 modules. They are similar to Ada private child subunits. This allows the specification and implementation of a module to be expressed in separate program units, which improves packaging of large libraries, allows preservation of trade secrets while publishing definitive interfaces, and prevents compilation cascades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran

Gord, I hate compilation cascades....

Python sucks.

Proof that some language designers use both mushrooms and crack - at the same time.

 

[puffnstuff]

HOLD ON!

this is from phonegaps twitter....

#
# everyone relax about the new policy. phonegap apps are accepted by apple.

so why is flash being blocked???

 

[winterspan]

The people doing the Lua gamekit might have a case, but C# isn't really that much of an easier language to learn than C/Obj-C. Maybe its memory management requires a bit less competence.

You completely missed the point. There are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of .NET/windows developers who can use UNITY 3D to make iPhone games with their existing skill-set. Obviously, if you are starting from scratch, you would want to learn Obj-C and the Cocoa platform.

 

[Bytor65]

HOLD ON!

this is from phonegaps twitter....

so why is flash being blocked???

Some Phonegaps apps have been blocked since last year for exactly these types of reasons:
http://nachbaur.com/blog/open-letter-to-apple-iphone-developer-support
" Upon review of your application, cannot be posted to the
App Store due to the usage of private API. Usage of such non-public
API, as outlined in the iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.2 is
prohibited:

” An Application may not itself install or launch other executable
code by any means, including without limitation through use of a plug-
in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise.
No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application
except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs
and built-in interpreter(s).

The PhoneGap API implemented in your application is an external
framework."


Some may be slipping through, but it has been clear in all versions of the SDK that using these frameworks is verboten.

 

[jragosta]

That's what CS5 does, except they appear to use their own (very similar) object code generator instead of xcode's. if you could get rid of all the (megabytes of) library code which translate all the compiled calls to flash's APIs into compiled calls to iPhone SDK APIs, it would be closer to a non-flash project, but still violate the new 3.3.1. The intermediate translated code would still very likely show up as huge, poorly structured, and obviously not human written.

So you were lying when you said that Adobe's system produced source code that could be sent to xcode.

If Adobe converted Flash to Objective C source code and that source code could be used in xcode, then it would be perfectly acceptable (assuming it met the other criteria).

What you're NOW describing is something entirely different.

Yes, if you believe that Flash is just a video player. Lots of posts by Flash developers here point out that building a web UI in Flash is simple - where it's difficult to impossible in HTML.

I'm still waiting for someone to explain what it is that Flash can do that html 5 can't do. You keep saying that html 5 won't do things, but no one will say what.

Before you answer, watch the Toy Story iAd demo to see just what html 5 is capable of.

 

[joshh2o]

It makes sense strategically, but Apple is really attacking Adobe's Flash a lot. They refuse to accept flash into their products.

 

[tbrinkma]

Indeed. My cousin has spent several months developing a game with Unity, only for Apple to turn around and do this. He doesn't know yet, but is unlikely to be very happy.

Actually, Unity (from what I recall from playing with it for a while) shouldn't be a problem. It either provides a native engine which you supply with scripts and assets (no problem there), or it provides the C/C++ code-base for an engine that you edit, recompile and supply with scripts and assets (no problem there either). They'll probably want to update things to better support the new OS version, but that's par for the course with pretty much any app.

If Adobe's Flash to iPhone tool does it like that it shouldn't have a problem either. I suspect though that it doesn't.

 

[mklnz]

I'm kind of actually glad for this. While Adobe's solution will allow many existing developers make Apps for the iPhone platoform, I really don't want some Flash developer who has probably little or not experience in developing for mobile devices to create apps for sale on the iTunes Store. As I'm currently learning Obj-c and the iPhone/iPad SDK, I know there are a lot of things you need to learn along the path other than just coding - e.g. Human Interface Guidelines etc. I believe Flash developers will pay very little attention to these kind of details and we'll end up with VERY bloat applications that almost guaranteed to be like ports.

 

[forgetaboutpro]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

Haha, the timing of this is a huge "screw you" to Adobe.

Now what, Adobe? Now what? All eyes are on you for the next move.

Honestly, while I love what CS4 lets me do on the Mac, it's the biggest piece if crap software. Most unstable thing on my Mac.

It would be funny if Adobe just pulled all Mac apps, going PC only. Would designers switch? Doubt it, they would just live with CS4 until someone else comes out with something to replace it.

No. Nothing comes close to what adobe offers. Apple are so far up their own arse they couldn't give a sh*t about what pros need and use anymore.

Just look at their hardware offerings - how long are we going to have to wait for updated Mbp's?

This whole flash thing is an egotistical joke. Steve, last time I checked you were not god. Grow up.