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

[ddrueckhammer]

Apple could buy a smaller company like Pixelmator to build an alternative for Photoshop but I'm not sure designers would play along. PSD is the industry standard and Apple would have a long way to climb to change that.

I don't know. Final Cut Pro has put a dent in Avid market share at least on the Mac. I would be willing to bet that designers who want to remain Mac based would switch to a first party alternative rather than go to Windows. Especially if they made an export to .psd function that mostly worked.

 

[Salacion]

The soap opera continues....

I hate soap operas. Where are the %!*$@# Macbook Pros??

Patience is a virtue.

 

[dante@sisna.com]

Apparently their "free and open" mantra only applies to Apple, as they have no problem with Adobe's proprietary Web. If it were anyone but Jobs pushing HTML5 so hard, they would have sainted him by now.

"Jobs Pushes for Non-Proprietary Web, Haters of Proprietary Apple Outraged Anyway."

Things that make you go "Hmmm..."

Amen, kill Flash. It's a terrible development environment. I say bring it on. Bring on html 5 and css 3.

I'm not worried about what adobe might do.

On a Mac, it's really easy to replace: Dreamweaver, Acrobat, inDesign (Page could get there fast), Pixelmator gets closer to photoshop each day. I would miss Fireworks but the older versions run great on Snow Leopard.

Let's head to the future.

 

[whitingrj]

Supported by this lady's nonsensical disillusion

Excuse me? Your post is vague and awkwardly phrased. I'm not asking for exact specificity, just a little more coherence.

 

[*LTD*]

What's with all this "Apple should buy Adobe and kill flash" crap? Adobe is already doing that for them.

And if there's anything I've learned from following Apple all these years, it's that the more people in forums like these get all flustered and their panties in a twist, the better the decision that Apple made. Don't ask me why this is, but everytime people bitch and whine about something, it usually ends up working out real well (but it's so far after the fact that no one bothers to say "I told you so").

LOL this is true, actually.

 

[jaw04005]

Great idea! "Let's kill 40% (or whatever the number is) of our business and stick it to Jobs. Yeah, we'll show him!"

That move would surely make Narayen CEO of the year. He should totally do it.

You’re exactly right. Adobe can’t afford to dump 40 percent of their user base for Photoshop.

Adobe’s stock price would drop like a rock (and it hasn’t been doing all that well anyway). If Adobe’s smart, they’ll dump Narayen and get Chizen back. At least Jobs somewhat respected Chizen.

http://www.macworld.com/article/61059/2007/11/chizen.html

Or let Warnock take it over again.

 

[dante@sisna.com]

I don't know. Final Cut Pro has put a dent in Avid market share at least on the Mac. I would be willing to bet that designers who want to remain Mac based would switch to a first party alternative rather than go to Windows. Especially if they made an export to .psd function that mostly worked.

Any day of the week. I would do whatever I had to, to develop on a Mac. I'd still test on all my windows virtual machines, however.

 

[firewood]

You dont seem to understand what the flash to iphone OS compiler does...

The apps would not be Flash, they would be translated into Cocoa touch and be just as "snappy" as other apps that you already have.

Not quite. Translations can vary in quality by massive amounts (try passing some poetry in your native language through Google language tools a few times).

Someone looked inside the CS5 iPhone app's .ipa decoded bundle. The "app" included megabytes of cruft library code even for an extremely simple app, in addition to what was spit out by Adobe's dynamic translator. The resulting code looks like it calls the Cocoa Touch APIs eventually, but only after being messaged by tons of library code to make sure all the quirks and oddities of the flash environment are emulated down to the pixel. It's really easy to tell the result is an automatic translation by looking at the resulting object code (which Apple and jbreakers can easily do).

Executing all this extra stuff can do nothing but slow down responsiveness and eat battery life.

 

[petsounds]

It's hilarious/pathetic to note that the same "free and open" people foaming at the mouth about Apple's proprietary nature are the same people foaming at the mouth about Jobs turning his back on Flash (proprietary) and pushing HTML5 (free and open).

First, your comments are completely off-topic. What Apple did with the dev agreement has nothing to do with Flash on the web; it's a calculated business move about their whole mobile platform that Gruber precisely pinpointed.

But to address your comments, did you know plug-ins are a PART of the HTML5 spec? Did you know that Adobe opened the SWF format, and that anyone can write their own player for the SWF format? Do you think Apple would open the iPhone app format so that other mobile platforms can use them? Haha! No way. So Adobe and Flash look a lot more "open" than Apple will ever be.

Don't be misled: Steve doesn't give a f--- about open standards (and btw, HTML5 hasn't even reached the draft committee, it is far from a standard). Steve punted Flash, and now Adobe's app creation tool, because they are threats to his pile of gold he bathes in from the locked-in revenue model of the App Store and closed software/hardware.

 

[ipedro]

I think a lot of creative professionals have been waiting for a Photoshop and Illustrator replacement for a long time. With Apple turning its focus to the consumer device market, I wouldn't expect this to happen now. Losing Photoshop would be devastating to Apple's Pro market regardless of how small the percentage of its total business that is.

 

[dante@sisna.com]

It's not that simple but there are measures that Adobe can take that will negatively impact Apple's shares.

Announcing that CS5 will be the last version of Creative Suite for OSX would cause APPL to plummet. It would give designers 2 to 3 years to switch to PCs so Adobe wouldn't lose their clients. The majority would just move to the OS that supports the industry standard applications.

Adobe's no chump. I'm sure they're considering their options.

In two to three years there would be superior Mac alternatives to Creative Suite -- I would love to see Creative Suite die a slow painful death. Leave that collection of bloatware behind. I would miss Illustrator and Fireworks, I will say that. But Bridge, Acrobat, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, no way. InDesign would be hard to replace but Pages would rise within two years.

Don't even get me started on Premier Pro -- it's a piece of junk.

 

[Peace]

But to address your comments, did you know plug-ins are a PART of the HTML5 spec? Did you know that Adobe opened the SWF format, and that anyone can write their own player for the SWF format? Do you think Apple would open the iPhone app format so that other mobile platforms can use them? Haha! No way. So Adobe and Flash look a lot more "open" than Apple will ever be.

And what application do these people use to write that SWF with ?

 

[dicklacara]

Flash is Flash. It would still be activated in an app. The main problem remains. Flash simply uses too much memory and too much battery! If you have not gotten it yet (it seems like it)... it is the two main reasons why Apple dislike Flash.

Some say it´s about competition. Maybe so, but the memory and battery issues are real! iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad would not be much worth with Flash all over the place.

I like my iPhone to be snappy! Deal with it...

Flash & Java will never be allowed on Apple mobile devices... iAd is the reason.

With the potential for 1 billion highly-effective, targeted hits per day to qualified buyers, Apple has a lot of ad leverage.

As a user and a stockholder I support the decision.

.

 

[Rocketman]

I'm a graphic designer and I would certainly hate to move to Windows but if the industry standard didn't exist on OSX, I'd reluctantly have to use a PC for work while still using the Mac as my main computer.

It wouldn't be a decision that Adobe would easily make, but an announcement of discontinuation of CS on Mac would hurt Apple. Adobe would recover the majority of its users on the exclusive PC platform while Apple's Pro line of computers would lose most of their reason to exist.

But you aren't entirely stupid. You would run your Windows instance running Adobe apps on a Mac in virtualization because the hardware is nicer, it crashes less, and the drivers are better.



Rocketman

 

[RazHyena]

Nah, I used to worry about this too, but in reality, Apple could fund and produce photoshop and illustrator replacement in about 9 months, that's my guess.

Adobe's products are generally garbage. I'll never forget the day I upgraded a bunch of machines from CS2 to CS4 -- I expected these huge improvements in Adobe's software after skipping CS3. I was astonished to see how very very little adobe had done to any programs in the creative suite between cs2 and cs4, save maybe inDesign.

I would not worry too much. There are nice alternatives out there: yes, they'd need polish, but with Pages as an inDesign replacement Apple would have a pretty easy time replacing Photoshop with Pixelmator. Illustrator would be a bit harder but they'd be able to pull it off.

Most consumers won't wait for Apple to "pull it off"; they'll move on. Especially the pros who NEED this sort of software for their work. The question is will Adobe ever get the nerve to start fighting back. I don't think they have it in them, to be honest. But it would be interesting if they yanked everything from OSX.

How dare you insult Adobe. Imagine a world without masterful animated classics like this.

 

[nostaws]

Crap. I gotta download, install, and get used to Gimp again. Because Adobe is going to halt the mac release of the next version of photoshop

 

[thetechnologist]

Come On Apple!

I'm a huge fan Apple products, however, I believe they are asking for an anti-trust investigation in banning the use of Adobe's Flash-IPA converter tool and related development technologies. The isn't just spitting in the face of Adobe but all of the developers out there who don't have time in their busy work schedules to master Objective C just for one platform - there is nothing wrong with such code translators. My company (like many) has been building an iPhone/iPad app for months now in Flash for exportation with the Flash-to-ipa converter tool and, all of sudden, Apple renders it void out of spite towards Adobe. This would be like the US government banning the use of foreign language and interpreters in the US and only allowing citizens who speak native-level English to remain in the nation. Can you imagine the backlash? If a tech giant like Microsoft tried this on their platform, the courts would be all over this. Apple is taking it's ego too far in this decision and, for the first time, I hope someone steps in and slams them in court over their App Store approval practices (Adobe Converter Bans, Google Voice delay, Opera Mini delay, Web Albums HD pinch functionality, and many more). I don't understand how Apple has avoided litigation thus far.

 

[whitingrj]

Don't even get me started on Premier Pro -- it's a piece of junk.

I like Premiere Pro...

Tons of add-ons/plug-ins, plays well with After Effects and I've never had any problems compatibility-wise. Almost every format from any camera I've tried to pull into PP directly has just worked - no Log and Transfer need (shudder... FC).

That said, I learned on PP and quickly grew to love it. And, obviously, because of that, I'm not a huge fan of Final Cut.

*sigh* To each his own.

 

[ddrueckhammer]

Flash & Java will never be allowed on Apple mobile devices... iAd is the reason.

With the potential for 1 billion highly-effective, targeted hits per day to qualified buyers, Apple has a lot of ad leverage.

As auger and a stockholder I support the decision.

.

QFT

This is the gold rush. Both Apple and savy developers are going to be making TONS of money in this arena.

I can't really knock them for it though. Ad-based apps on other platforms and iPhone OS before iAds did suck.

 

[dante@sisna.com]

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple doesn't already have a team building applications to compete with Creative Suite. It does seem like a much cheaper path to just destroy Adobe than try to buy them...

I have ALWAYS suspected this was the case.

Somewhere, in a black box project at Apple, there lives a small group of software engineers. They've grown out of the Pages, Aperture, Final Cut camps -- they live now drafting a framework for the core creative suite replacements.

I really believe this is probably the case.

 

[Rivix]

Its ironic that Apple is pushing for an open platform, when everything else they do is so locked down (iTunes - iPod only for instance.)

 

[firewood]

Why do they care what language it was originally written in?

Embrace and extend, by whoever controls the APIs that developers actually use. MS "expanded" the HTML protocol used by IE to help kill off Netscape. Apple knows enough history to not let that happen to them (again).

 

[thetechnologist]

Adobe Bans Photoshop on Mac OS

Adobe should ban use of all Creative Suite tools on the Mac OS. That would solve that problem -jk

 

[Imperil]

I'm really glad they changed the developer agreement. The amount of Flash shovelware would have not only hurt users by being 99.9% crap to sort through (including the good games as the performance issues are horrendous) but would have bogged down the AppStore and the good games would have had to wait longer to get approved.

Win for Apple. Win for Developers. Win for Users. Fail for Adobe. Fail for Flash Scripters.

 

[dante@sisna.com]

I like Premiere Pro...

Tons of add-ons/plug-ins, plays well with After Effects and I've never had any problems compatibility-wise. Almost every format from any camera I've tried to pull into PP directly has just worked - no Log and Transfer need (shudder... FC).

That said, I learned on PP and quickly grew to love it. Needless to say, because of that, I'm not a fan of Final Cut.

*sigh* To each his own.

No, you are probably right.

I learned on Final Cut and just cannot wrap my brain around Premier. Video is not my main gig -- it is a sideline at best -- and I always use premier when am I stressed and on deadline.

I should try to warm up to it more.