It is pretty funny telling one of the world's best CEOs to "grow up". Who are you?
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Apple Blocks Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone Compiler in Latest SDK Agreement
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It is pretty funny telling one of the world's best CEOs to "grow up". Who are you?
I agree with Apple from this standpoint. To keep the OS stable and extend the battery life it is important to govern certain aspects of development. This OS is meant for a low memory, battery powered device. Apple produces the hardware much the same as a PS3, Xbox 360, or the Wii. Its basically quality control and assurance. I am sure different various iPhone compilers could wreak havoc on the system.
There are three problems with that:
1. Apple would sue Adobe in a heartbeat. You see, Adobe has a near monopoly on professional graphics software - and doing what you suggest would be a clear antitrust violation.
2. Adobe would lose customers left and right.
3. It has been clear for years that Apple could produce a better Photoshop if they wished. Almost all the functionality is built into the OS - all they need is a new front end. If Adobe did that, Apple would have its Photoshop killer on the market in a matter of months - and Adobe couldn't withstand the loss of revenues.
The board would kick the CEO out in microseconds if he even suggested such a thing.
Not at all. Adobe has just as much ability to make money from the iPhone ecosystem as anyone else. There are a series of fairly simple rules involved that Apple asks developers to follow. The ones who chose to follow the rules are reaping the benefits - Adobe chose not to. That's hardly Apple's fault.
As has been pointed out, Adobe could have added html 5 to CS 5 - but refused to do so. They could have created a Flash to Objective C converter rather than going with a run time environment which is clearly prohibited. Adobe made their bed, now they get to sleep in it.
Wow, a lot of assumptions! A common run environment time tries to do just that, create a common foundation for many environments. In doing so, it's necessary to form you own foundation of spin locks and waits and many other constructs that attempt to divorce the code from the platform. Inevitably this is going to be counter productive to a number of the platforms involved. The assumption that it will be as well behaved as an app written in the native language is naive.
Add to all of that, that it was created by Adobe, notorious for lack of discipline, makes it even more unlikely.
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Universal Health Care - Have you talked about it with your European friends, your Asian colleagues and your African relatives? Why not?
Well. I worked down the hall from a bunch of compiler geeks working on autoparallelizing supercomputer compiler. Turns out the supercomputer OS they were targeting was extremely sensitive to a bunch of things. Write in a specific way using the language that their tuned compiler supported, plus use a bunch of carefully selected pragmas and compiler options, and the supercomputer gave you TOP500 class performance. Run Pascal on it, and the machine benchmarked slower than a desktop PC.
And on some types of code you can easily get over 100X difference on a new Mac Pro (with a nice graphic card) between using C/gcc and OpenCL/LLVM.
Only if the target platform does not support those features. An RTL on Windows would call native APIs for semaphores, mutexes and thread management - it would not recreate special versions of those. I would assume [yes] that the Adobe .IPA generator would do the same.
Nice bit of FUD.
Nice bit of absurdity - thanks for the laugh. Are your tea bags steeped?Nope. The API calls would still have to go through a thick translation layer, as the translated Flash API calls do not map anywhere close to 1:1 with the Cocoa Touch API calls.
Both CS5 and Xcode use LLVM as an intermediate code in the build process. You could, with a little hacking, convert CS5's LLVM output into garbage-C to then feed into Xcode to turn back into Apple's LLVM intermediate code, but optimization would probably suffer.
Naïve Pascal programmers can do that all the time.
(Look up "pass by value" vs "pass by reference".)
You can not sue Adobe for dumping OSX support and offering incentives to switch over to the Windows version of the software. Adobe did nothing wrong.
Now if Microsoft was the one backing the play Apple could sue Microsoft for it but Adobe which has no interest in either OS is another story.
Plus Adobe can just point to the stunt Apple is pulling right now as their reasoning for doing it. Apple is in a risker spot to be sued that Adobe packing up its toys and leaving.
Being one of the world's best CEO's doesn't excuse such immature behaviour. Or do you agree with this move?
As a great many saner individuals have pointed out, this a perfectly sound technical decision that will benefit the platform and the customers and even current real iPhone developers.
The only losers here are the script kiddies who want to script up a flash app and have a runtime to run it on the iPhone without understanding anything about the platform.
So yes I agree with it, and I would also have clarified the policy, but I probably would have done it soon as the old wording of those clauses were awkward and open to interpretation.
Note I said clarify because if you read it in Context in both SDKs agreements, it really hasn't changed, you were pretty much prohibited from from third party frameworks/api in the old version as well.
The only immature behavior has been from the Adobe Blogger and the nitwits that suggest Adobe the corporation act like a petulant teenage girl and destroy their own business to "get back at Apple".
Remember, people (well, the vast majority of the population, specifically excluding Adobe employees, plus maybe a few other strange zealots) don't want Flash, they want content. If the same content is available in alternate forms (HTML5 video on an increasing number of websites, "AJAX" based interactivity, etc,) the end user doesn't care what the underlying technology is. When you go to a website, say, ESPN.com, do you honestly care if the video player is Flash vs. HTML5? When that obnoxious 'cover-up' ad appears, do you really care if it's Flash or AJAX?
No. Content is content. Yeah, it's a bit obnoxious for Steve Jobs to tell us what format of content we can and cannot have; but if the content developers are in a mad rush to develop content for the hot new Apple iProduct, the content will shift format to where the target market is. If that means Adobe gets screwed, what does the average end user care? For that matter, what does the average developer care? Unless you are extremely heavily invested in Flash development, to the point that you had completely ignored interactive HTML5 elements, it shouldn't matter at all. (Or, of course, if you are Adobe.)
Ironically, if Apple had waited to launch the iPhone until HTML5 is was sorted out and finalized, they might have gotten away with their "websites are apps" concept they pushed when the iPhone first came out. (*MIGHT*. I still think there is a real need for real apps, but they would have gotten less resistance, at least.)
Think of it like the music industry. A few labels tried to push crappy DRM-laden CDs that broke computers. That failed to catch on, because the end-user was directly affected by the content; so they chose to avoid it. Sony had their own proprietary digital music format, with their own store. People didn't desire the content there, so they didn't choose to use it. Apple used a standard music format, with proprietary DRM added; but because they presented it in a way that wasn't onerous to the consumer, consumers flocked to that content. (They also made it less onerous for the content producers than Sony did.)
Steve is not the only CEO who's company has (legally) significantly beat market returns over a long period of time, and who has also been called immature.
Either there's a problem with the desires of shareholders (big returns) and the behavior it takes to get these returns, or a problem with the naive perception of "immaturity" in leaders. (I expect the latter, given that every past and current president,premier,etc. has probably been called an lying idiot by at least 10% of the populace...)
Agree absolutely with your above statement (whole post not just excerpt!) but how much of the web is offered in HTML5? I'm not a fan of flash but there is an awful lot of content out their that is built in it.
The end user won't care how the content gets delivered but they will (and do) care when it doesn't get delivered at all..
No, a "friggin zealot" is someone who blindly supports an organization or cause even if they are in the wrong or their position is nonsense. From the jab that you just made, you're more than likely one of them, especially since I posted "proof" in my last post.
Did I say Quicktime API? No, I said GRAPHICS API, as in OpenGL, which is the only framework Apple supports. Since zealots like you just read one or two words and not the whole idea before responding, I'll bring up my case in point that I said I use my Mac a lot for: playing games. There's two games that I play that are available for OS X and Windows: Heroes of Newerth and World of Warcraft. I have the settings for both set the exact same, yet they always run a LOT more efficiently and smoothly in Windows as opposed to OS X. Why? The Graphics API is a bloated mess with way too much overhead. Personally, I wish Apple would somehow adopt DirectX, because their implementation of OpenGL is an ungodly mess in terms of efficiency.
You're both wrong.
It could be easily argued that Adobe has a monopoly position in professional graphics. As a monopoly, they play by a different set of rules. If they were to arbitrarily drop the Mac version, they most certainly would open themselves up to antitrust complaints. In fact, using their professional graphics software monopoly to leverage Flash onto portable devices would be a crystal clear antitrust violation.
I don't doubt that. Even if you converted Flash to Objective C and then put it through xcode, it would be a lousy implementation. But it WOULD be compliant with Apple's rules. If you feed Objective C code to xcode, it is acceptable - regardless whether you created that code from scratch, got it from a Flash to Obj C converter, or received it on tablets from Mt. Sinai. The key is that it has to be Objective C code. Apple doesn't require that it be optimized at a certain level (although if it's too bad, they can reject it for excessive RAM usage or lousy performance).
The only problem with your position is that the 'friggin zealot' position is not wrong (anyone with even a shred of integrity would acknowledge that it's at least a defensible position even if the final resolution hasn't come out yet). You're assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong and therefore a friggin zealot.
Maybe you should drop the name calling and try to argue the facts rather than your silly attacks.
The problem is you're not even addressing my facts, so why should I even try? You're just all the more proving my point.
There's a very easy way for this to still work...
All Adobe needs to do is have their tool write Objective-C or C++ code and let the developers compile it. I think tis is more targeted at Mono (which allows developers to code native iPhone apps using .NET and C#) than it does with Adobe and Flash.
Adobe can definitely work within these guidelines. Even Mono could if it just writes code that will be built with Xcode. Ultimately THAT'S what Apple is afraid of - they want to control the tool that generates the final binary, so their approval process isn't further bogged down with verifying binary file integrity as well as network compliance and UI experience.
I'm not saying Apple's not a control freak, they certainly are, but I am saying that if you want to play with Apple's hardware you need to spend your time working with Apple instead of pushing the boundaries to see what you can get away with to avoid doing things their way.
All Adobe needs to do is have their tool write Objective-C or C++ code and let the developers compile it. I think tis is more targeted at Mono (which allows developers to code native iPhone apps using .NET and C#) than it does with Adobe and Flash.
Adobe can definitely work within these guidelines. Even Mono could if it just writes code that will be built with Xcode. Ultimately THAT'S what Apple is afraid of - they want to control the tool that generates the final binary, so their approval process isn't further bogged down with verifying binary file integrity as well as network compliance and UI experience.
I'm not saying Apple's not a control freak, they certainly are, but I am saying that if you want to play with Apple's hardware you need to spend your time working with Apple instead of pushing the boundaries to see what you can get away with to avoid doing things their way.
First, this was a horrible business decision by Adobe. The moment I heard them say "you'll be able to export to the iPhone from CS5" I immediately thought "this is going to get interesting ...that is something Apple will have no part of." then I started thinking that Adobe would never be stupid enough to waste that much time and money to try and do an end run around Steve without his ok on the matter. Guess I was wrong.
This is a smart move by Apple, for a couple reasons. First, Adobe's CS suite is already quite popular. Second, it runs on the much more popular Windows platform. If you don't have a Mac do you A.) Go buy a Mac? or B.) Go buy an app for your PC that costs much less? For a Windows user i'm guessing a lot of people would go with option B. Steve would never risk Adobe's tools (which they have no control over) becoming one of the main sources for iPhone app development. Especially when they have become notorious for being CPU hogs and battery killers.
The ironic part is that Adobe has now become the company that is relying on the decisions of a third party to affect their bottom line. Unfortunately for them it's with a company that they have crapped on a few too many times in the past.
This is a smart move by Apple, for a couple reasons. First, Adobe's CS suite is already quite popular. Second, it runs on the much more popular Windows platform. If you don't have a Mac do you A.) Go buy a Mac? or B.) Go buy an app for your PC that costs much less? For a Windows user i'm guessing a lot of people would go with option B. Steve would never risk Adobe's tools (which they have no control over) becoming one of the main sources for iPhone app development. Especially when they have become notorious for being CPU hogs and battery killers.
The ironic part is that Adobe has now become the company that is relying on the decisions of a third party to affect their bottom line. Unfortunately for them it's with a company that they have crapped on a few too many times in the past.
While I know where you're coming from, this isn't even close to being true.
You can buy a Mac for $599 (less if you accept refurbished or buying from a third party). That would be more than sufficient for software devopment.
The full version of CS 4 is $1600 on buy.com. I don't know what CS 5 will cost, but Adobe doesn't have a history of LOWERING prices.
By your logic one may then argue that as a monopolistic company Adobe has to release their software for Linux, HP-UX, MVS, VMS, Maemo and all other operating systems. I wonder how come nobody sued them yet? Or is it just Apple that has such a privilege?
Good, **** Flash. It's high time the web moves on.
I wouldn't be so against flash if it wasn't a buggy, cpu-hogging, closed-source piece of **** that has been behind NUMEROUS serious exploits, allowing viruses to spread very easily just by visiting a webpage that exploits Flash (Google "flash virus exploit" and you get millions of hits).
Besides, they've reveled in being the #1 interactivity technology for the Web for over a decade(!), and now that HTML5 does MOST of what Flash was used for (video and animations), it's time we move on.
This can ONLY be a good thing.
Developers will soon learn how to make games with HTML5, using javascript for the core logic, and a HTML5 Canvas element to draw characters, play sounds, etc.
It can be done, and it WILL be done. Soon enough we'll have gamemaking libraries and the world will fully move on from the buggy, ****** security risk that is Flash.
edit: SPOKE TO SOON! THERE ARE GAME LIBRARIES FOR HTML5 ALREADY! WOW! VIDEO OF QUAKE2 RUNNING IN FULL 3D AND 30+ FPS WITHOUT ANY BROWSER PLUGINS (JUST JAVASCRIPT AND WEBGL)! OR HOW ABOUT A GAME DEVELOPMENT HUB FOR HTML5 DEVELOPERS? Check these out and stop bitching about "OMG NO GAMES WITHOUT FLASH"! ;-)
