Steve Jobs Offers Explanation About iPhone SDK Changes Restricting Adobe and Other Cross Compilers

[christian_k]

Hello Steve Jobs,

If you really dislike all open and platform independent technology and software devlopment you should be consequent:

- No more BSD code in the OS, rewrite everything from scratch
- No dev tools based on GCC or LLVM whatever, write your own
- Forget about KHTML based browsers, create your own! Maybe you could get the source for Macintosh IE from Microsoft for a reasonable price.
- Lets talk about CUPS, Apache, Samba, Ruby, Python, the shell and all the other nice things you use in your desktop OS. I am sure you could replace all that stuff easily .... (don't you?)

If everyone had regulated third party development as strict as you do, your glorious Mac OS X would not even exist.

Yes, you can stay in your walled garden. But take a break and have a look at OS9 again. That is where you would be today without the enormous results of free and open software development. Remember: All that would have not been possible if others had locked down their systems the way you do now.

Christian

 

[skeep5]

Adobe are charging extortionate amounts for products that have hardly changed in 5 years (photoshop), and in the case of flash are probably acting more as an anchor to progress than a driving force. They just want to keep riding the gravy train.

AGreed!

 

[jons]

Could apple not just work with the unity team and add certain APIs to the approved list?

Seems to me, as long as your not using unsupported APIs and your code compiles in Xcode, you should be good to go, right?

 

[Salacion]

Quite a bit of ranting going on here.

It's annoying to see people use absolutely no logic when they post their opinions.

 

[str1f3]

Hello Steve Jobs,

If you really dislike all open and platform independent technology and software devlopment that you should be at least consequent:

- No more BSD code in the OS, rewrite everything from scratch
- No dev tools based on GCC or LLVM whatever, write your own
- Forget about KHTML based browsers, create your own! Maybe you could get the source for Macintosh IE from Microsoft for a reasonable price.
- Do not forget about CUPS, Apache, Samba, Ruby, Python, the shell and all the other nice things you use in your desktop OS. I am sure you could replace all that stuff easily .... (don't you?)

If everyone had regulated third party development as strict as you do, your glorious Mac OS X would not even exist.

Yes, you can stay in your walled garden. But take a break and have a look at OS9 again. That is where you would be today without the enormous results of free and open software development. Remember: All that would have not been possible if others had locked down their systems the way you do now.

Christian

Sorry but that is coming off like the rant of a child and I don't what this has to do with the topic at hand considering Flash is proprietary . During the Jobs' era Apple has contributed to open source just as much as they've taken.

-Webkit has primarily been a push by Apple
-they bought CUPS and kept it open source
-they created Grand Central in Snow Leopard and open sourced it

As for your comment about the "walled garden", something tells me that you don't have a problem with needing to use Google services with Android or the massive amount of data that Google collects on its users. All they've done is provided a bigger "walled garden" for now.

 

[Bytor65]

And you're being paranoid. You also don't know much about programming it seems. Running on a Mac eliminates 90% of producers period, be it quality or crap, you say so yourself in the next sentence.

If the quality is the same as now, there would be the same percentage of garbage to quality. Tools don't make garbage, people make garbage. To think otherwise is either blind devotion to Apple or plain ignorance of the subject matter.

I have plenty of development experience, nearly two decades writing telecommunications software. Your cell phone is probably running on my network code. What is your real programming experience.

As I said, if you operate under the assumption of equal quality, the doors would be open for ten times as many apps.

10 times as many good ones, and 10 times as much CRAP. There is no shortage of either and the approval system would grind to a crawl.

That is the best case. 10 times as many good new apps and 10 times as much more Crap. Even as a best case it wouldn't be a good idea.

But the assumption of equal quality out of a Flash-to-App converter and a native developer are completely ridiculous.

1) First you have the remarks of those who want to use Flash-to-App: They are the "I am not a programmer, I don't want to take time to learn" group from comments we read here. This is not a high quality group.
2) The best developers tend to just learn the best tools and use them, they won't be the ones using Flash-to-App.

The Flash-to-App group, is one that contains a group that contains large numbers of non programmers, people uninterested in the actual target platform and is barren of top developers who wouldn't use mediocre tools.

Thus the Flash-to-App group will bring 10 times as much garbage to the apps store, but it will NOT bring 10 times as much top quality apps. They are a total detriment.

 

[backdraft]

Its a pain if you don't use the official tools/frameworks. Sure you could use Mono, QT, or if you really want <sarcasm>speed</sarcasm> Java!

Graphics for example DirectX vs OpenGL what's easier to develop for? Maybe try your luck on CUDA?

I think I'll develop apps with the tools and frameworks specifically provided my whoever created the platform.

Unity translates to Object C it doesn't cross compile. It's also C/C++.

And you're being paranoid. You also don't know much about programming it seems. Running on a Mac eliminates 90% of producers period, be it quality or crap, you say so yourself in the next sentence.

If the quality is the same as now, there would be the same percentage of garbage to quality. Tools don't make garbage, people make garbage. To think otherwise is either blind devotion to Apple or plain ignorance of the subject matter.

The fact is these tools do exist right now and are in use (Novell's Monotouch, Unity 3D, Macruby, etc..) and the garbage to quality ratio of the app store hasn't changed. It's still 85% garbage. A flash packager wouldn't change this.



Wait, are you trying to say this would be hard or are you being ironic and pointing out that it's very easy to write GUI apps in Windows. Seriously, if you really believe that those are your only options, I can start naming a few...

 

[Kesuke]

AGreed!

I reckon the number of illegal adobe products in use probably far exceeds the number legitimately licensed. Then there is license abuse. How many 'student edition' copies of adobes products aren't exactly being used by students.

There was (and I suppose still is) so much potential for Adobe to come up with a clever and innoative pricing stratergy for its products. But instead they are stuck in a 1995 attitude of "Charge £500 for a single machine copy, of a product that has barely changed in 5 years".

How about either charging a reasonable amount or looking into some sort of subscription service. Why sell these great big multi-product suites - why not just use some sort of 'steam' style downloader so users can just choose the products they want with clever pricing stratergies on them.

 

[Digitalclips]

Apple already made that one fellow remove a simple reference to his Android version from his App Store submittal.

Apple sometimes acts like a company that's terrified of its competition. Which is odd, since the iPhone has seemingly found its successful niche in the market.

I'm curious to see how much Apple will mellow out when Jobs is no longer in charge someday.

My read is the total opposite. Apple seem so comfortable now they do what they think is best and you can go along for the ride or not.

 

[PeterQVenkman]

Games, of course, ought to use hardware acceleration for graphics rendering and calculations. It's conceivable that Adobe could implement their Flash App publisher to do this, but I have a hard time believing they did. E.g., in all these years they haven't bothered to implement hardware acceleration in the Mac OS Flash plugin.

Apple won't let them, remember? You have some good points, and Adobe has been lazy, but Apple is partially to blame there. I think it was a long-term calculated business move to further demonize flash.

 

[KnightWRX]

1) First you have the remarks of those who want to use Flash-to-App: They are the "I am not a programmer, I don't want to take time to learn" group from comments we read here. This is not a high quality group.
2) The best developers tend to just learn the best tools and use them, they won't be the ones using Flash-to-App.

The Flash-to-App group, is one that contains a group that contains large numbers of non programmers, people uninterested in the actual target platform and is barren of top developers who wouldn't use mediocre tools.

You have an obvious and irrationnal bias against Flash, which this topic isn't even about. Again, learn about the tool and platform before passing judgment. The people who want to use Flash-to-app are the quality Flash programmers would make complex games and applications as much as the kid in his basement who could do the same thing he did with Flash with Interface Builder and a few choice copy-paste off the Web.

The fact is, there would not be more crap on the App store and the only reason there is crap on there now, is not the tools used to make such crap, it's Apple approving said crap.

And again, this does not only impact Adobe or Flash but many others.

 

[firewood]

Grow up. It is actually possible, although not accepted under the TOC, to run the SDK on a PC via a number of methods and I'm sure some app developers do.

Yes it's possible, but the percentage of people who do so is tiny. And as I've posted before, some tiny percentage of cruft apps is probably beneficial to the long tail benefits of the App store, but not something that needs to be encouraged.

 

[KnightWRX]

Its a pain if you don't use the official tools/frameworks. Sure you could use Mono, QT, or if you really want <sarcasm>speed</sarcasm> Java!

Graphics for example DirectX vs OpenGL what's easier to develop for? Maybe try your luck on CUDA?

Wait, are you saying that Win32 or MFC is easier to program in than QT ? No, the simple fact is there are a lot of frameworks out there which greatly simplify Windows GUI developement, not make it more complicated. QT is one, wxWidget another. These are all easier than even Windows.form or the dreaded Win32 API. In fact, in all my years, I've never encountered anything more complicated than the Win32 API.

Also, Windows developement is not locked into 2 or 3 languages which all amount to C. You can write Windows GUI apps in about any programming language there is through bindings either to the .NET framework or to 3rd party frameworks.

And to answer your other question: OpenGL.

Seriously, it's comments like these that make me wonder if people are actually qualified to post in such a thread...

 

[str1f3]

Apple won't let them, remember? You have some good points, and Adobe has been lazy, but Apple is partially to blame there. I think it was a long-term calculated business move to further demonize flash.

Does it matter anyway? 10.1 is only available as a beta on all platforms and the hardware acceleration only deals with video and not ads, websites and games.

I agree it's a long term calculated move by Apple but it's not just there to screw over Adobe. They want control over their hardware and software and not be dependant on another company.

Look at what's going on with the JooJoo on Engadget. Flash sucks on it and Adobe is saying it sucks because they didn't weren't consulted. This is what happens when you're depend on proprietary software.

 

[firewood]

I'm not saying they won't, but I think if Apple allow Unity to continue but disallow Flash CS5 they will probably be looking at an anti-competitive practise lawsuit because their selectively obstructuve buisness model is harming Adobe's ability to be competitive.

That's a perfectly legal practice as long as Apple's share of the cell phone OS market is maybe 3% total (or 15% smart). Just because 85% of smart phone owners don't buy software doesn't give Apple any control over them or their marketplace.

McDonalds doesn't have to carry a competitor's tacos, no matter how much fast food they sell.

 

[Stella]

or if you really want <sarcasm>speed</sarcasm> Java!

Graphics for example DirectX vs O.

These days its a myth that Java is slow.

 

[alent1234]

Apple won't let them, remember? You have some good points, and Adobe has been lazy, but Apple is partially to blame there. I think it was a long-term calculated business move to further demonize flash.

word is that flash sucks on linux as well. and even on windows 7 on my laptop the fan goes off just by visiting facebook

 

[Kesuke]

1) First you have the remarks of those who want to use Flash-to-App: They are the "I am not a programmer, I don't want to take time to learn" group from comments we read here. This is not a high quality group.
2) The best developers tend to just learn the best tools and use them, they won't be the ones using Flash-to-App.

The Flash-to-App group, is one that contains a group that contains large numbers of non programmers, people uninterested in the actual target platform and is barren of top developers who wouldn't use mediocre tools.

Seems a bit "holier than thou, dost thine programming impress thee?"

I'm of the view that good apps are good apps. The benefit of flash isn't that it can be used by morons who can't code - its that it can be used to create one programme that is then compiled into multiple versions of code for different devices. 1 developer, 1 programme - multiple products. Apples move to lock developers into their SDK enviornment aims to discourage developers from working on other platforms.

 

[cmaier]

These days its a myth that Java is slow.

No it's not. With JIT it's faster than it once was, but give me gcc and I'll beat it any time.

 

[Bytor65]

And again, this does not only impact Adobe or Flash but many others.

We don't know what will be blocked by this, but as I stated before. Tools that aid development for the iPhone platform will likely go untouched. Many expect Unity3d will be fine.

Things that try to be wedge another platform on top, like Flash, will almost certainly be banned. For solid reasons.

So in the end the only real complainers are the set of people who have no interest in the iPhone platform, just in propagating another target for their competing platform. So no real loss.

 

[netdoc66]

I beg your pardon, I only promised you a walled garden...

 

[Kesuke]

That's a perfectly legal practice as long as Apple's share of the cell phone OS market is maybe 3% total (or 15% smart). Just because 85% of smart phone owners don't buy software doesn't give Apple any control over them or their marketplace.

iPhone OS has a 55% market share of the so called 'superphone' market and a 20% share of the 'smartphone' market. How big apple is would be irrelevant - what matters is whether their buisness is anti-competitive and is damaging another companies ability to compete in their market. But as I said before, this is a logic that will be hard to accept for enthusaists. But never the less we've seen before on several occasions that when these things go to court they rarely fule in favour of the defense.

McDonalds doesn't have to carry a competitor's tacos, no matter how much fast food they sell.

Bad analogy. A food vendor is subject to competition in other ways - for example the location and number of their stores. Also, McDonalds is a franchise and so compete internally to some extent aswell as externally with other vendors.

 

[Friscohoya]

Good try Adobe. Just focus on delivering a polished PDF annotating program in addition to a touch version of Photoshop.

 

[firewood]

Thus the Flash-to-App group will bring 10 times as much garbage to the apps store, but it will NOT bring 10 times as much top quality apps. They are a total detriment.

That's exactly it. It's a numbers game. If 85% of Obj C apps are garbage according to somebody's metric, betting odds are that that number would go way up over 90% for Flash-to-App ones using that same quality metric, whatever it is.

(And they aren't all a total detriment. I occasionally find an ugly but interesting app in the bottom 25%, and get an occasional 5-star review from all corners of the planet for one of my ugly bottom dwelling apps, e.g. not from one of my relatives.

 

[cmaier]

Bad analogy. A food vendor is subject to competition in other ways - for example the location and number of their stores. Also, McDonalds is a franchise and so compete internally to some extent aswell as externally with other vendors.

On the contrary, it's a good analogy. Apple's app store is subject to competition by many other ecosystems, including RIM, MS, Palms, Android, Samsung, and the carrier's appstores. Apple has no more of a monopoly over appstores than it does over white power bricks with Apple logos on them.