I think some people are alluding to the fact that he was knocking on death's door as little as a year ago. Probably most people don't wish him dead, but some certainly wish for the _effects_ of him dead, some of which might be the loosening of tyrannical grip on developers and a decrease in the number of purely emotional decisions (this, banning Google Voice, etc.).
No disrespect intended here. But I have to say this.
I just think this is starting to get a little morbid.
It's better to win in the field of ideas. If you have a better way, go compete. Create a phone or a tablet or a web site or whatever, and build a business.
Wishing someone dead so you can leach off of the one they built is a little 'punk-like'.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying I want him dead or even the effects of that. I'm just speculating that many people probably do. You could not possibly disrespect me by saying anything about those hypothetical people because I do not embrace their position.
Care to elaborate? I don't know Apple history too well, but I thought their near-bankruptcy was just because their products weren't very good and Microsoft was dominating the PC market.
No, that part was a strategy to save themselves that didn't work so well because it was too little, too late. Not to mention that they did made a nice profit from that scheme.
You should get your facts checked. How much did Performa help? If that was part of the strategy and you claim it was working, how come, that Jobs returns, does exactly the opposite—gets rid of the clones and drastically trims product line–and Apple starts climbing up again.
Ironically, if Jobs wasn't pushed out in 1985, Apple would have gone bankrupt even faster. Jobs' perfectionism is an asset now that he's let it be ever-so-slightly compromised by market necessities, but the Mac wouldn't have been a viable platform into the 1990's if, as Steve continued to insist, they not include a hard drive or any fans. His same perfectionism over the NeXT cube (and over such details as which shade of gray to paint the factory) nearly ran NeXT into the ground.
I think Jobs learned from those failures, but the history is a lot more complicated than "Jobs gets pushed out from Apple, Apple starts floundering, Jobs comes back and Apple succeeds."
NeXT was the best thing to happen to Apple. The NeXT OS was miles ahead of anything else at the time, and it has been probably the thing that helped Apple survive. I'd go so far as to say if Jobs had of returned when he did, but Apple hadn't picked up NeXT OS, it wouldn't matter what Jobs did, Apple would be a shadow of what it is now.
I continue to be impressed with the license Adobe gives their official representative. This is not the first unprofessional reaction I've seen on this blog. Yes, it is understandable. Is it wise? Maybe a better worded response could inflame the minds of the abused more effectively and not sound like a temper tantrum.
Don't assume that he's presenting Adobe's only alternate course of action. He's taking two different courses of action taken by two different companies and asking the reader to compare them.
The problem is that his comment is totally irrelevant. Whether what Adobe is doing is better than what Apple is doing has zero bearing on whether it's the best thing for Adobe to do, which is what my comment was about. The rhetorical tactic he was employing was to make it seem as if there are only two options, be Apple or be Adobe as it is in this post. That rhetorical dichotomy is misleading, even if he wasn't making an exclusive logical statement.
Again, these two continuums are completely unrelated.
Stab <---> Not Stab
Professional <---> Not Professional
My claim is that a professional, not-stab approach would be more effective than a not-professional, not-stab approach. To me it seems like this is a bit difficult to argue against, but I suppose it's possible that this temper tantrum post will be more effective than a strong-but-professionally-worded post in the same direction. Maybe you disagree.
Regardless of whether you do, comparing Apple's behavior to Adobe's is irrelevant and misleading. Comparing the two might incorrectly lead people to believe that this post is a good idea because it compares favorably with what Apple has done. In fact, whether this post is a good idea is completely unrelated to how bad Apple's behavior is.
Let me clarify -- theflashblog.com is not produced by Adobe, the company. It is written by an official representative of Adobe, but it is not the official response of Adobe the company, and the site is not an official Adobe site.
That's true, however since the original HN thread title was "Adobe Reacts...", which combined with your comment gacw the impression that the post was an Adobe response by an Adobe representative. Of course now the title has been changed (at my suggestion...) which makes this all look a bit silly :).
I don't think people care about the technical difference. In practical terms, if you are an "official representative", you should keep your personal views to yourself, as people will assume your "view" is influenced by the company that pays your salary.
Nonetheless, he claimed in this post that he was speaking as Adobe's representative. In my mind, if you explicitly make that claim, all the disclaimers in the boilerplate avail you nothing.
The fact that Adobe has some editorial control of it (even after the fact) means that Adobe is concerned that the personal opinions of their official representative may reflect badly on Adobe. There's no absolute choice here between "official Adobe blog" and "personal blog" -- it's somewhere in the middle. The only way it could truly be one guy's personal opinion is if he remained completely anonymous.
I was really shocked at how partisan and flagrantly accusatory this post was. Does Adobe really want this kind of mudslinging associated with their company name?
An honest and justified gripe is fine with me; I even respect people for not being afraid to accuse in such a case, but I guess they should consider people who value decorum higher, as you do.
Since when is some silly notion of "professionalism" an absolute measure of the worth of what people say?
Personally I'd prefer something profanity-laced that I can relate to (as long as it actually presents reasoned arguments!), over some artificial, self-censored PR-speak.
I'm sorry, but I really don't give a damn. There's a lot of speculation here (and elsewhere), and until I hear anything official from Apple I refuse to get too wound up.
You seriously think that if this were just a misunderstanding, they would let all of this Apple hate grow and grow for over 24 hours? They would have issued a statement clarifying things by the end of business hours yesterday if this "speculation" were wrong.
Well, that's sort of what I'm driving at. Apple clearly has an agenda with this clause and its not 100% clear to the developer community what that agenda is. Do they mean things like PhoneGap are dead, or simply things that provide an alternative API (e.g. running apps via the Adobe Air runtimes). How about cross compilers? Does Apple really give a damn if you write something in Scheme and then have it transcoded into Obj-C? I highly doubt.
My point is that their agenda, while useful to know, mean nothing in the long run, because as long as that clause is active, Apple has the ability to enforce it capriciously.
Whether or not they "mean" things like PhoneGap are dead, etc., is irrelevant. The ability to kill any app because of its original source language is the important thing.
You do realize that "ability" was already there? They've always had full control of what they allow in the store, so this latest change is only significant in intent, not ability.
We have something official, more official than any press release: the developer contract
We have Gruber's interpretation of a complex legal document, taken completely out of the context in which "Application" is defined. Lawyers don't get paid big bucks to interpret this stuff for nothing.
They get paid to try and convince a judge or jury that their client's interpretation of the document is the correct one. You think it's a mistake the text is a bit vague and not everything properly defined ?
Legal texts aren't software; it's actually in the best interest of Apple to define things as broad and vaguely as possible so they cover a large spectrum.
I think Gruber's interpretation is one that any person reading the document will have.
That was actually an interesting approach, but still doesn't seem logic. You can't actually develop a Flash app without using the iPhone OS so then you have to follow the C/C++/ObjC rule.
But if the author is counting on "not using the SDK" altogether then basically your whole developer agreement with Apple is void since the whole purpose was to develop "applications". And if the agreement is void there is no reason for Apple to accept your stuff on AppStore.
I think what he was looking for was the link between the rules Apple uses to accept/reject things from the store and the SDK agreement... but yeah, it seems to be a moot point.
IAAL. Contracts only matter to the extent and in the manner that they are ENFORCED by the parties to the contract. Everything else is pure speculation and intellectual masturbation...or, in this case, pursuit of an agenda.
As far as I know, the last time Apple formally responding to the internet debates was when the FCC forced a statement about Google Voice: "HTML5 is open and free enough for anything you want. Google is more than free to create an HTML5 app." We might see something like the rare Phil Schiller emailing John Gruber at Daring Fireball, but I'd highly doubt that.
Unless it highly affects sales (which I doubt the average consumer cares about developers), or a very well known App developer pulls their apps completely (and by well known, I mean well known by the public like Facebook or EA), there'll be no formal or informal response.
"What is clear is that Apple has timed this purposely to hurt sales of CS5"
As many other commenters pointed out here, theflashblog.com is not an official Adobe blog.This is definitely not "Adobe's reaction" as the title suggests.
It's not an "official Adobe blog", but what he writes depends upon what Adobe chooses to redact or not. That sounds like a very passive aggressive way for Adobe to tell Apple to screw themselves.
I find it slightly amusing that these two statements are in adjoining paragraphs:
The trouble is that we will never hear their discontent because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted
[Sentence regarding Apple's intentions redacted at request from Adobe].
We've been down this road before with the HTML5 vs Flash iPad post that Lee Brimelow made. The title is wrong, this is not Adobe's official response this is from an Adobe evangelist.
Someone should edit the title for this post -- theflashblog.com is not an offical Adobe blog, and the post is simply the reaction of one Adobe employee. This is not the 'official Adobe response'.
The trouble is that we will never hear their discontent
because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging,
posting to social networks, or other things that we at
companies with an open culture take for granted.
Not really. It's his website, his soapbox. In his position, I wouldn't want to deal with all the unintelligible Apple fanboy posters either -- even at the expense of the likely-few reasonable, well thought-out posts.
Publishing on teh intarwebs is cheap and easy. If some potential commenters want their own soapbox, they can easily get one. I honestly don't understand why it's become "required" that readers of any site should be able to comment on what's written on that site. Let the content stand for itself. If you have an opposing viewpoint, use your own channel to promote that viewpoint; don't leech off of someone else's.
Of course the question everyone is interested in is are you allowed to publicly comment on / criticize issues like Apple strategy, policies and technologies. So are you?
I've never experimented with that boundary. Publicly criticizing your employer is unwise and unprofessional no matter who you work for. I don't imagine there are many Fortune 500 companies where you would last very long doing that.
Yeah of course that's obvious, but is there or is there not a company rule that prohibits employees publicly commenting on company matters like the Adobe guy says?
Edit: I just realized that you're not allowed to comment on it if there is one :)
So, there are a couple things here that jump to my mind.
1. Adobe isn't completely innocent. They're pretty close to a monopoly on their type of software and charge dearly for it (their Creative Suite costs as much as a MacBook Pro). They've done a lot to make sure there are no non-Adobe Flash players even when that's just hurting customers and not costing them money since they don't sell the player. They're not exactly "open" and "free".
2. Apple could be said to have an interest in not supporting intermediaries. Intermediaries are likely to create less efficient code and I'm sure they don't want to deal with developers using up their support time over things that are the fault of Adobe's Flash SDK or Novell's C# one.
3. It's also in Apple's interest to get people using Objective-C and their toolkit. It brings developers to the Mac by forcing them to buy one. That will have positive externalities in more software for the Mac. It gets developers into the Obj-C camp which means more people with Mac development skills. It means that apps can't be re-compiled for iPhone, Android, and webOS - and that's huge for customer lock-in. We all know how users get attached to their apps and I think it's easy to imagine Adobe building an Android compiler right after the iPhone one got finished.
Do I like Apple's stance? No. As a user and a developer, it's bad for me. However, Apple's the market leader and getting people to use their API gives them control and means that app developers will always be ready to use the latest new features they add while building a wall of incompatibility against Android and webOS that will keep users buying iPhones for apps in the way that users bought Windows computers for their apps for ages.
Jobs wanted web apps. Developers balked. Web apps would have been cross-platform (at least with Android and webOS). Apple responded to developers and now they've seen their chance to lock users and developers to their system.
Adobe isn't known for being open. Given the chance, Adobe seems to wall itself off as much as Apple. Companies tend to go for openness insofar as it's in their interests.
There is some debate about whether the Adobe/Macromedia Flash EULA can be considered binding, but Gnash developers prefer to avoid the issue by not installing Adobe/Macromedia tools, and thereby not accepting the EULA. We can use tools like Ming to generate Flash testcases, and we rely on the efforts of volunteers to run our testcases on commercial software and report the result.
I know i will get downmodded for saying this, but the blog entry is from 2008 and and the faq you linked to speaks only of a debatable possibility of possible restrictions in Adobe's then EULA.
Also, it is worth noting that Adobe has never gone after these open source swf player projects.While i agree that Adobe is not as open as it should be, i dont see any reason not to appreciate a good gesture from a powerful company.
> Adobe has never gone after these open source swf player projects.
They went after rtmpdump, a tool developed by the gnash devs after clean-room reverse engineering to eventually bring RTMP support (client video streaming) to gnash and other free players:
> rtmpdump is an open-source command-line tool that is designed to dump the full RTMP stream. It implements the RTMPE protocol, which Adobe believes to be an encryption and copyright protection scheme: however analysis of RTMPE shows that RTMPE is nothing of the kind. rtmpdump was removed from its original SourceForge page due to Adobe issuing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, which Sourceforge did not have the resources to contest, and could not place any other sourceforge projects at risk. flvstreamer is a fork of rtmpdump which removes all the code that Adobe believed was in violation of the DMCA (due to the belief by Adobe that RTMPE is an encryption mechanism). flvstreamer still allows users to download a stream of audio or video content from all RTMP servers, as long as RTMPE is not enabled on the server. rtmpdump development was restarted in October 2009 and is hosted at the MPlayer site[5]. It has much improved functionality and has been rewritten in C (was C++).
While I agree that Apple isn't forcing developers onto the Mac from a financial perspective, I think it's in their best interest to promote it from a holistic one.
Indie Mac developers think a little differently than any other, and it's a direct result of the influence from Apple's UX aesthetic. There is immense respect for the conventions that have been established, and any feature that breaks away from them better have a damn good reason. I just can't see a developer that chooses Windows XP as their main operating system completely understanding the platform and putting the same amount of care into their work.
While I agree that Apple isn't forcing developers onto the Mac from a financial perspective, I think it's in their best interest to promote it from a holistic one.
The funny thing is, Apple has been promoting their platform to developers for years by making it a Unix that just works. And now they're un-promoting it by having a bunch of developer-hostile policies.
It turns out that Embarcadero Technologies, the company I work for, is now developing an IDE that targets the Mac. It will be useful for testing that, at least.
> Jobs wanted web apps. Developers balked. Web apps would have been cross-platform (at least with Android and webOS). Apple responded to developers and now they've seen their chance to lock users and developers to their system.
Jobs didn't want web apps, he wanted no apps. Web apps would have been more than useful given the right js APIs. It wouldn't have done a thing for games, but there's a great deal of stuff you could technically build in html + js if it were a true first class development environment.
Not really. Native third party apps were originally a concession to demands from users/developers by all accounts I've heard. Regardless, the original strategy was to encourage web-based apps.
Well, since there was an SDK since day one, of course they anticipated third party development. The point is that they were pointing developers at web apps at launch. Why am I explaining this to you? It's public record. Look it up.
Well, you did not read a lot of accounts then. Unless you believe that it was possible to develop the SDK (and APIs and App Store) to the level it was released at in six months.
Of course it was planned from the very start it was just a matter of resources and priorities. SDK was not ready by the time iPhone was launched, was it a good reason to delay the product? No.
Who cares about a company being "innocent" ? What does that even mean ?
>(their Creative Suite costs as much as a MacBook Pro)
Do you have a serious study saying that Creative Suite is overpriced ? Because it doesn't look that way to me. And what does that even have to do with anything ?
>I'm sure they don't want to deal with developers using up their support time over things that are the fault of Adobe's Flash SDK or Novell's C# one.
So they could have added a clause to the dev agreement saying they won't support the dev choosing to go with other SDK's or languages. That would have been a TOTALLY different story no ?
> 3. It's also in Apple's interest to [...]
Of course it's in Apple's interest. The way they're ready to alienate a non negligible part of their partner's base (because that's what devs should be, partners) for their short term interrest is kind of scary though. I even really doubt it's a clever strategy if you consider Apple's interest alone.
>Do I like Apple's stance? No. As a user and a developer, it's bad for me. However, Apple's the market leader and getting people to use their API gives them control
However what ? You know the problem isn't even the fact that the platform is closed to others languages. If it has been like that from the beginning of the IPhone/Ipad, it wouldn't be the same problem at all. The real problem in this story is that Apple is ready to screw other peoples businesses. It reminds me of the Playstation3/Linux story, in some ways. People have invested time and money in this platform, and yet Apple decides to change the terms of the game and screw them over completely. The fact that they have the right to do it doesn't make it right. It's immoral and wrong.
> Adobe isn't known for being open. Given the chance, Adobe seems to wall itself off as much as Apple.
Examples please. I may have forgotten some things, but on the top of my mind, i can't find anything even remotely similar to this.
People have invested time and money in this platform, and yet Apple decides to
change the terms of the game and screw them over completely.
Investing in a platform does not guarantee you'll profit from your investment, nor does it oblige the provider to continue providing you the means to recoup your investment.
The fact that they have the right to do it doesn't make it right.
What in this sentence do you not understand ?
Also, Apple relies on developers to make some of their profit. Even if it's a relatively small profit, screwing theirs openly doesn't look like a very clever business practice to me.
Is it "wrong" or is it just obnoxious and bad business?
Did Apple make some sort of promise not to pull this sort of nonsense? Such promises do exist, BTW. They are called Open Source licenses. (Not an Open Source zealot by any means!)
Lesson learned, time to move on. Make a note that Apple is capable of this. Protect yourself with platform diversification or with platform on a FOSS license. Move on and make something of value.
Clearly you've never spent a lot of your hard earned money and time on something just to have it squashed by some big company :) Believe me it's not fun feeling...
I will assume the down-voter thinks Apple is forcing him to buy a Mac.
If you want a Mac, go buy one. You don't need Apple as an excuse. They are very good computers, very well built and have an OS that, IMHO, is second only to a decent Linux box as a development platform.
It's so good it breaks my heart to install Linux on top of it. So much in fact I never did it.
Except once, when I installed MkLinux on a Power 9500. Very nice X terminal, BTW.
Nope, you're getting downvoted because your comment doesn't actually add anything to the discussion. Snarky replies aren't (generally) considered valuable here.
Well then, rephrasing the first comment for those who didn't get it, I see no reason to think developers are being forced one way or the other.
As a developer, you choose the platform you intend to use to deliver your application. Nobody is being forced anything. There is a huge potential market outside the App Store.
If you bet the company on Apple's good mood, it's only your fault they pull your app, change the rules of the game and drive you out of business. They own the clients. If you want to sell to their clients, you better be ready do jump when they tell you to. Actually, it's no different than selling to a telco on a platform like Brew.
As a dominant player, Apple not only has to foster the development of killer apps for their platform, they cannot afford killer apps evolving on other platforms. Unless they change course, that's what will happen.
I don't disagree with any of your points in a fundamental sense: sure, Apple is well within their rights to set the policies they have set, and I understand that Apple believes that all this gives them a distinct market advantage (I won't try to pass judgment on whether or not that's correct; I don't think anyone here knows for a fact whether they'd be better off another way).
Development for a mobile device is different. If you were developing a Windows application, you'd be expected to own a Windows system. If you're developing a MacOS X application, you'd be expected to own a system that runs MacOS X.
But what about an iPhone application? By the above logic, you should only be expected to own an iPhone. Now, this analogy breaks down a bit, because I wouldn't expect anyone to actually develop a serious piece of software directly on an iPhone (at least not without an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard). So you need another platform to do your development on. Apple is requiring you to buy a Mac. Clearly they have development tools that work on Windows, otherwise Win Safari wouldn't be possible. A port of the iPhone SDK to Windows (or Linux, or whatever) is certainly not out of the question... it's just a matter of throwing resources and time at it. Now, again, I can certainly believe that Apple would think that restricting iPhone development to Macs is in their best interest, but it's ludicrous to suggest that this decision is also in their developers' best interests. I think that's what a lot of people are pissed off about.
Go to another mobile platform? Sure, you can do that, but then you're restricting your market. Yes, there are quite a few other lucrative mobile platforms (several of which have greater market share than the iPhone), but, as a developer, you end up with the unfortunate choice of having to either not develop for the iPhone, or buy an expensive piece of hardware that you only use for iPhone development. And by "expensive" I don't just mean the price tag. I also mean costs in training (even if it's self-training), maintenance (in 5 years your speedy Mac won't be so speedy anymore), and upgrades (IIRC you already can't install the latest version of Xcode on anything older than Snow Leopard; I imagine this trend will continue).
I know people like you seem to think that it's an easy binary decision: 1) don't buy a Mac and don't develop for the iPhone, or 2) buy a Mac and develop for the iPhone, but there's a lot that goes into that decision, including a judgment of whether or not developing an app that you may not be "allowed" to distribute is worthwhile.
> I know people like you seem to think that it's an easy binary decision
As with any business decision, you have to weight as many factors as possible. Unless you have some marketing muscle for promoting your app, chances are it will drown in an ocean of similar applications. Worse: in an ocean of applications with similar names and descriptions.
Going the Apple way has never been an easy thing. At least in the pre Xcode days, Macs had a wider choice (like two vendors?) of development tools. I never liked MPW and preferred the Metrowerks tools. On the Mac, you program to a small slice of the pie, but a less crowded one. The iPhone is different - it represents a huge slice of the "people willing to pay for mobile apps" pie, but the slice is very, very crowded.
Yep, very true. With the huge number of free apps with similar features to many of the paid apps, it sounds pretty hard to make it big in this space. And despite all the buzz and publicity the iPhone gets, it's still not the dominant mobile platform by market share.
Companies tend to go for openness insofar as it's in their interests.
I've been developing this metaphor while reading and posting to other threads:
- Companies are like states.
- Ownership is like sovereignty
- Open Source licenses are like constitutions and the rule of law
- Community processes are like democracy
Totalitarian states can also discover that being open to commerce can be in their interest, but still act coercively when doing so suits them more. Constitutional democracies can be considered safer for business, since it disallows arbitrary actions and ensures due process. By analogy, Open Source platforms can be considered safer for business.
(This doesn't mean that I won't publish on the App Store. But it does mean that I'm going to look at platform diversification as a safety measure! I guess this move by Apple has had the opposite from desired effect in my case.)
The Flex SDK is free, you can develop and compile Flash apps and web apps without buying any of their software. And they don't require a $99 fee just to have the opportunity to sell your work, or take 30% of the cut.
They don't provide that, but it's not like there aren't plenty of companies that will provide all of those things. The main factor here is that with Flex or (almost) any other platform, you have the choice of how you want to go about selling and distributing your work.
I think this person will regret writing this post tomorrow, if not sooner. This is akin to having an emotional reaction to someone's email and returning an immediate flame email, later feeling like a complete jerk. But this is on a much grander scale, writing a blog post as an official representative of an entire company. Very poor taste.
Sure there is. I'm not saying they'd go there, but they could make a blanket statement that all i{pad,phone} apps be exclusives, and if they see the app appear in another mobile store, it's gone. Again, I'm not saying they'd go there, but they certainly could.
Quite possibly the lamest blog post ever from an Adobe employee - and there have been a good deal already.
I personally reason entirely with Apple's choice. I understand every bit of it (and it's not just my fervent zeal of dislike for the obese, sluggish behemoth that Flash has become.)
Any real developer would not in good conscience be able to support this.
I hate such broad-sweeping statements.
What is clear is that Apple most definitely would [abuse their loyal users and make them pawns for the sake of trying to hurt another company].
Apple has always been about the experience of using their products, and I think a lot of what they're doing with their mobile devices still stems from that focus. Maybe they're being too heavy handed, but, then again, they're not allowing grandma's phone to be overrun with software that affects the perception of the device itself.
Comments disabled as I’m not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots.
> they're not allowing grandma's phone to be overrun with software that affects the perception of the device itself.
That may be fine if you're 'just producing devices,' but Apple presents the iPhone and the iPad as the 'future of computing' with a vision of all computing being done on devices like this in the future. Therefore the way they treat their devices' ecosystem now should be a predictor of how they see their role in the ecosystem in the future, a future where their devices are the only devices.
sheesh... while one half of Adobe's brain (the flash-obsessed Macromedia one) is still screaming and flinging mud, the other half already used some of the perfectly Apple-endorsed C/C++ code they've got lying around and build a useful iPad App: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-ideas-1-0-for-ipad/id36... - It's not like they're all about Flash; although it's obviously this guy's job to make it look like it - hence the title of evangelist.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing. All the huffing and puffing about openness when they list C/C++ among the ordained languages. Have that many people completely divested themselves of the most cross-platform compatible languages there is? I realize they're ugly step sisters, but if you structure the projects right it's not like it's impossible.
The language is mostly irrelevant. It's the framework that matters. You can't plop a gtk, MFC, Qt, or whatever app on an iPhone. You drop a UIKit app on the iPhone, and that's it.
"if Apple were simply trying to block Adobe from cross-compiling Flash to create iPhone apps, it could have added the changed text to its existing license agreement and spoiled Adobe's CS5 party immediately, rather than just threatening change that appears fated to kick in when Apple delivers iPhone 4.0 in June.
The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple's plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app.
"[The operating system] can't swap out resources, it can't pause some threads while allowing others to run, it can't selectively notify, etc. Apple needs full access to a properly-compiled app to do the pull off the tricks they are with this new OS," wrote one reader under the name Ktappe."
Many posters are missing the point here. Apple is heading Adobe off at the pass, so that Flash is not a viable development platform. The fact that the agreement term can be interpreted to prevent umpteen different other cross-platform development environments is only relevant to the extent Apple's agenda includes enforcing the terms against the makers of those environments.
Now, assuming Apple is using this language to defeat the expectation that Flash is viable on the iPhone OS, who really loses? I would argue that elimination of Flash is win for everyone but Adobe, but that's my opinion. Even if you like Flash a lot, you can't fault Apple for not accommodating Adobe given the belligerent history between them.
I guess I just have a hard time mustering sympathy for Flash developers after years of frustrating, shoddy, inconsistent web experiences with Flash. There are a few exceptions (artists like http://yugop.com/ come to mind, as well as the acceleration of online video) but, overall, Flash has been a nightmare for opinionated web users like myself. Good riddance.
There's a few things you can do in Obj-C that would be pretty hard to do in Java, but...
It's not the language, it's the framework. UIKit and friends really are very good; they're the secret sauce of the iPhone OS and I'm not sure Android has anything comparable.
That's actually good news. If iPhone SDK is a superset of Android capabilities and all of the glue/compatibility framework has to be on the Android side, then this further insulates users of the translation kit from punitive actions from Apple.
(The framework itself needs to be implemented carefully to avoid Apple's ire. Apple itself may want to implement it, as it would put their Obj-C toolset in the position as the original, and other platforms get the copy.)
Take a look at Cappuccino. They claim to have reimplmented the Cocoa APIs in Javascript, arguably a language even more restrictive than Java. Java of course is a bit different language-wise than JS or ObjC, to be sure, but I'd imagine you could support a decent subset of UIKit in Java... though the method call syntax would of course be different.
I find it ironic that while Brimelow claims: "Any real developer would not in good conscience be able to support this. The trouble is that we will never hear their discontent because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted." it seems unlikely that he's actually able to take his "open culture" much for granted when they've openly censored several parts of his post, as he freely admits.
Honestly, I still think people writing native code and using the native APIs for a platform like the iPhone is something worth enforcing. On the desktop multiplatform development toolkits consistently fail to deliver a user experience that is seamless and on par with apps built with the native APIs (especially on a platform with different interface conventions and guidelines, ie Mac OS) and for a platform such as the iPhone where resources are not infinite, and the interface is especially important, it just makes sense to enforce people doing things 'properly'. If that knocks out a few decent applications along with all the lazy, rubbish ports then I think that's acceptable. If they're really that amazing, then they probably justify being rewritten natively.
One place where I do have issue with this policy is in the case of game engines/middleware (ie. Unity). Due to the complexity and development requirements of game middleware I think an exception, or a more refined policy, is required to allow middleware to give the required 'leg-up' to game developers. Additionally, while Apple has provided an awful lot of what developers need to create great View-based applications for the iPhone with Cocoa Touch (within the constraints what third-party apps are allowed to do, at least), they haven't done so for games. This is understandable, again due to the aforementioned complexity of game engines, but it makes games a special case.
Apple wants developers to develop iPhone's apps and share the profit, instead of flash sites (and share the troubles with crashing crappy plugin). That is clear and obvious.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadUhhh
What?
The Apple Board?
Fire Steve Jobs?
Yeah, good luck with that buddy.
I just think this is starting to get a little morbid.
It's better to win in the field of ideas. If you have a better way, go compete. Create a phone or a tablet or a web site or whatever, and build a business.
Wishing someone dead so you can leach off of the one they built is a little 'punk-like'.
Now again, no disrespect.
I'm just sayin'.
I just wanted to address that whole line of thought before it went too far down the rabbit hole.
History is foremost in everyone's mind right now.
I think Jobs learned from those failures, but the history is a lot more complicated than "Jobs gets pushed out from Apple, Apple starts floundering, Jobs comes back and Apple succeeds."
You know that "too much of a good thing" thing, right?
Which is worse?
Stab <---> Not Stab
Professional <---> Not Professional
My claim is that a professional, not-stab approach would be more effective than a not-professional, not-stab approach. To me it seems like this is a bit difficult to argue against, but I suppose it's possible that this temper tantrum post will be more effective than a strong-but-professionally-worded post in the same direction. Maybe you disagree.
Regardless of whether you do, comparing Apple's behavior to Adobe's is irrelevant and misleading. Comparing the two might incorrectly lead people to believe that this post is a good idea because it compares favorably with what Apple has done. In fact, whether this post is a good idea is completely unrelated to how bad Apple's behavior is.
Let me clarify -- theflashblog.com is not produced by Adobe, the company. It is written by an official representative of Adobe, but it is not the official response of Adobe the company, and the site is not an official Adobe site.
How professional.
Personally I'd prefer something profanity-laced that I can relate to (as long as it actually presents reasoned arguments!), over some artificial, self-censored PR-speak.
No matter what Apple says in the next few days, nothing short of removing the new clause can prevent Apple from enforcing it at will.
Whether or not they "mean" things like PhoneGap are dead, etc., is irrelevant. The ability to kill any app because of its original source language is the important thing.
We have Gruber's interpretation of a complex legal document, taken completely out of the context in which "Application" is defined. Lawyers don't get paid big bucks to interpret this stuff for nothing.
Legal texts aren't software; it's actually in the best interest of Apple to define things as broad and vaguely as possible so they cover a large spectrum.
I think Gruber's interpretation is one that any person reading the document will have.
Not necessarily. See: http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/508678742/stop-interpreting-l...
But if the author is counting on "not using the SDK" altogether then basically your whole developer agreement with Apple is void since the whole purpose was to develop "applications". And if the agreement is void there is no reason for Apple to accept your stuff on AppStore.
Unless it highly affects sales (which I doubt the average consumer cares about developers), or a very well known App developer pulls their apps completely (and by well known, I mean well known by the public like Facebook or EA), there'll be no formal or informal response.
did anyone read this before the post was edited?
As many other commenters pointed out here, theflashblog.com is not an official Adobe blog.This is definitely not "Adobe's reaction" as the title suggests.
The trouble is that we will never hear their discontent because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted
[Sentence regarding Apple's intentions redacted at request from Adobe].
Please do not reply to this. Especially if you do not agree.
Publishing on teh intarwebs is cheap and easy. If some potential commenters want their own soapbox, they can easily get one. I honestly don't understand why it's become "required" that readers of any site should be able to comment on what's written on that site. Let the content stand for itself. If you have an opposing viewpoint, use your own channel to promote that viewpoint; don't leech off of someone else's.
Of course, they stick pretty much on topic so I'm not sure if they occasionally inject personal opinion...
Edit: I just realized that you're not allowed to comment on it if there is one :)
1. Adobe isn't completely innocent. They're pretty close to a monopoly on their type of software and charge dearly for it (their Creative Suite costs as much as a MacBook Pro). They've done a lot to make sure there are no non-Adobe Flash players even when that's just hurting customers and not costing them money since they don't sell the player. They're not exactly "open" and "free".
2. Apple could be said to have an interest in not supporting intermediaries. Intermediaries are likely to create less efficient code and I'm sure they don't want to deal with developers using up their support time over things that are the fault of Adobe's Flash SDK or Novell's C# one.
3. It's also in Apple's interest to get people using Objective-C and their toolkit. It brings developers to the Mac by forcing them to buy one. That will have positive externalities in more software for the Mac. It gets developers into the Obj-C camp which means more people with Mac development skills. It means that apps can't be re-compiled for iPhone, Android, and webOS - and that's huge for customer lock-in. We all know how users get attached to their apps and I think it's easy to imagine Adobe building an Android compiler right after the iPhone one got finished.
Do I like Apple's stance? No. As a user and a developer, it's bad for me. However, Apple's the market leader and getting people to use their API gives them control and means that app developers will always be ready to use the latest new features they add while building a wall of incompatibility against Android and webOS that will keep users buying iPhones for apps in the way that users bought Windows computers for their apps for ages.
Jobs wanted web apps. Developers balked. Web apps would have been cross-platform (at least with Android and webOS). Apple responded to developers and now they've seen their chance to lock users and developers to their system.
Adobe isn't known for being open. Given the chance, Adobe seems to wall itself off as much as Apple. Companies tend to go for openness insofar as it's in their interests.
http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/64
Other implementations do exist, but Adobe has taken action to hamper those efforts.
EDIT: Other people can argue for as long as they like about what is considered hampering, but Adobe isn't exactly free and open with flash.
See http://www.openscreenproject.org/about/faq.html to see how much Adobe has opened up since.
Also, it is worth noting that Adobe has never gone after these open source swf player projects.While i agree that Adobe is not as open as it should be, i dont see any reason not to appreciate a good gesture from a powerful company.
I hate when people say this. It's like saying "my point is valid, but people on HN are too stupid to get it".
They went after rtmpdump, a tool developed by the gnash devs after clean-room reverse engineering to eventually bring RTMP support (client video streaming) to gnash and other free players:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol#RT...
> rtmpdump is an open-source command-line tool that is designed to dump the full RTMP stream. It implements the RTMPE protocol, which Adobe believes to be an encryption and copyright protection scheme: however analysis of RTMPE shows that RTMPE is nothing of the kind. rtmpdump was removed from its original SourceForge page due to Adobe issuing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, which Sourceforge did not have the resources to contest, and could not place any other sourceforge projects at risk. flvstreamer is a fork of rtmpdump which removes all the code that Adobe believed was in violation of the DMCA (due to the belief by Adobe that RTMPE is an encryption mechanism). flvstreamer still allows users to download a stream of audio or video content from all RTMP servers, as long as RTMPE is not enabled on the server. rtmpdump development was restarted in October 2009 and is hosted at the MPlayer site[5]. It has much improved functionality and has been rewritten in C (was C++).
I'm not convinced Apple is trying to force developers to buy Macs, and I'm far from convinced that such a strategy would actually work.
Indie Mac developers think a little differently than any other, and it's a direct result of the influence from Apple's UX aesthetic. There is immense respect for the conventions that have been established, and any feature that breaks away from them better have a damn good reason. I just can't see a developer that chooses Windows XP as their main operating system completely understanding the platform and putting the same amount of care into their work.
The funny thing is, Apple has been promoting their platform to developers for years by making it a Unix that just works. And now they're un-promoting it by having a bunch of developer-hostile policies.
I never did get around to it - my girlfriend went farther than I did - and so it sits, gathering dust, under my desk.
But if I had a toolkit that let me develop iPhone apps without having to buy a Mac Mini, then I'd be much more likely to develop an iPhone app.
So take me as a data point: the existing practical restrictions forced me to buy a Mac.
The App Store is 185k titles strong, most of them crap. Developers without a passion for the platform are exactly what they don't need any more of.
Jobs didn't want web apps, he wanted no apps. Web apps would have been more than useful given the right js APIs. It wouldn't have done a thing for games, but there's a great deal of stuff you could technically build in html + js if it were a true first class development environment.
Who cares about a company being "innocent" ? What does that even mean ?
>(their Creative Suite costs as much as a MacBook Pro)
Do you have a serious study saying that Creative Suite is overpriced ? Because it doesn't look that way to me. And what does that even have to do with anything ?
>I'm sure they don't want to deal with developers using up their support time over things that are the fault of Adobe's Flash SDK or Novell's C# one.
So they could have added a clause to the dev agreement saying they won't support the dev choosing to go with other SDK's or languages. That would have been a TOTALLY different story no ?
> 3. It's also in Apple's interest to [...]
Of course it's in Apple's interest. The way they're ready to alienate a non negligible part of their partner's base (because that's what devs should be, partners) for their short term interrest is kind of scary though. I even really doubt it's a clever strategy if you consider Apple's interest alone.
>Do I like Apple's stance? No. As a user and a developer, it's bad for me. However, Apple's the market leader and getting people to use their API gives them control
However what ? You know the problem isn't even the fact that the platform is closed to others languages. If it has been like that from the beginning of the IPhone/Ipad, it wouldn't be the same problem at all. The real problem in this story is that Apple is ready to screw other peoples businesses. It reminds me of the Playstation3/Linux story, in some ways. People have invested time and money in this platform, and yet Apple decides to change the terms of the game and screw them over completely. The fact that they have the right to do it doesn't make it right. It's immoral and wrong.
> Adobe isn't known for being open. Given the chance, Adobe seems to wall itself off as much as Apple.
Examples please. I may have forgotten some things, but on the top of my mind, i can't find anything even remotely similar to this.
What in this sentence do you not understand ?
Also, Apple relies on developers to make some of their profit. Even if it's a relatively small profit, screwing theirs openly doesn't look like a very clever business practice to me.
Did Apple make some sort of promise not to pull this sort of nonsense? Such promises do exist, BTW. They are called Open Source licenses. (Not an Open Source zealot by any means!)
Lesson learned, time to move on. Make a note that Apple is capable of this. Protect yourself with platform diversification or with platform on a FOSS license. Move on and make something of value.
No. Thanks. I have no urge to develop for iPhone, iPod or iPad, much less in Objective C.
I think I am gonna pass this one. ;-)
If you want a Mac, go buy one. You don't need Apple as an excuse. They are very good computers, very well built and have an OS that, IMHO, is second only to a decent Linux box as a development platform.
It's so good it breaks my heart to install Linux on top of it. So much in fact I never did it.
Except once, when I installed MkLinux on a Power 9500. Very nice X terminal, BTW.
As a developer, you choose the platform you intend to use to deliver your application. Nobody is being forced anything. There is a huge potential market outside the App Store.
If you bet the company on Apple's good mood, it's only your fault they pull your app, change the rules of the game and drive you out of business. They own the clients. If you want to sell to their clients, you better be ready do jump when they tell you to. Actually, it's no different than selling to a telco on a platform like Brew.
As a dominant player, Apple not only has to foster the development of killer apps for their platform, they cannot afford killer apps evolving on other platforms. Unless they change course, that's what will happen.
Development for a mobile device is different. If you were developing a Windows application, you'd be expected to own a Windows system. If you're developing a MacOS X application, you'd be expected to own a system that runs MacOS X.
But what about an iPhone application? By the above logic, you should only be expected to own an iPhone. Now, this analogy breaks down a bit, because I wouldn't expect anyone to actually develop a serious piece of software directly on an iPhone (at least not without an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard). So you need another platform to do your development on. Apple is requiring you to buy a Mac. Clearly they have development tools that work on Windows, otherwise Win Safari wouldn't be possible. A port of the iPhone SDK to Windows (or Linux, or whatever) is certainly not out of the question... it's just a matter of throwing resources and time at it. Now, again, I can certainly believe that Apple would think that restricting iPhone development to Macs is in their best interest, but it's ludicrous to suggest that this decision is also in their developers' best interests. I think that's what a lot of people are pissed off about.
Go to another mobile platform? Sure, you can do that, but then you're restricting your market. Yes, there are quite a few other lucrative mobile platforms (several of which have greater market share than the iPhone), but, as a developer, you end up with the unfortunate choice of having to either not develop for the iPhone, or buy an expensive piece of hardware that you only use for iPhone development. And by "expensive" I don't just mean the price tag. I also mean costs in training (even if it's self-training), maintenance (in 5 years your speedy Mac won't be so speedy anymore), and upgrades (IIRC you already can't install the latest version of Xcode on anything older than Snow Leopard; I imagine this trend will continue).
I know people like you seem to think that it's an easy binary decision: 1) don't buy a Mac and don't develop for the iPhone, or 2) buy a Mac and develop for the iPhone, but there's a lot that goes into that decision, including a judgment of whether or not developing an app that you may not be "allowed" to distribute is worthwhile.
It's not so cut and dried.
As with any business decision, you have to weight as many factors as possible. Unless you have some marketing muscle for promoting your app, chances are it will drown in an ocean of similar applications. Worse: in an ocean of applications with similar names and descriptions.
Going the Apple way has never been an easy thing. At least in the pre Xcode days, Macs had a wider choice (like two vendors?) of development tools. I never liked MPW and preferred the Metrowerks tools. On the Mac, you program to a small slice of the pie, but a less crowded one. The iPhone is different - it represents a huge slice of the "people willing to pay for mobile apps" pie, but the slice is very, very crowded.
I've been developing this metaphor while reading and posting to other threads:
Totalitarian states can also discover that being open to commerce can be in their interest, but still act coercively when doing so suits them more. Constitutional democracies can be considered safer for business, since it disallows arbitrary actions and ensures due process. By analogy, Open Source platforms can be considered safer for business.(This doesn't mean that I won't publish on the App Store. But it does mean that I'm going to look at platform diversification as a safety measure! I guess this move by Apple has had the opposite from desired effect in my case.)
I too don't like what Apple did, but you are comparing different things.
Though I'm enjoying the show quite a lot!!!
So this is merely offensive and insulting to programmers, and can't create any lasting competitive advantage.
I personally reason entirely with Apple's choice. I understand every bit of it (and it's not just my fervent zeal of dislike for the obese, sluggish behemoth that Flash has become.)
I hate such broad-sweeping statements.
What is clear is that Apple most definitely would [abuse their loyal users and make them pawns for the sake of trying to hurt another company].
Apple has always been about the experience of using their products, and I think a lot of what they're doing with their mobile devices still stems from that focus. Maybe they're being too heavy handed, but, then again, they're not allowing grandma's phone to be overrun with software that affects the perception of the device itself.
Comments disabled as I’m not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots.
I also find this highly patronizing.
That may be fine if you're 'just producing devices,' but Apple presents the iPhone and the iPad as the 'future of computing' with a vision of all computing being done on devices like this in the future. Therefore the way they treat their devices' ecosystem now should be a predictor of how they see their role in the ecosystem in the future, a future where their devices are the only devices.
> I hate such broad-sweeping statements.
I know no "real developer" who really likes Flash either, so, I find all this "oh no we want Flash" thing rather amusing.
> I also find this highly patronizing.
Patronizing? Sure... Incorrect? Probably not.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/09/apples_prohibi...
from the article:
"if Apple were simply trying to block Adobe from cross-compiling Flash to create iPhone apps, it could have added the changed text to its existing license agreement and spoiled Adobe's CS5 party immediately, rather than just threatening change that appears fated to kick in when Apple delivers iPhone 4.0 in June.
The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple's plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app.
"[The operating system] can't swap out resources, it can't pause some threads while allowing others to run, it can't selectively notify, etc. Apple needs full access to a properly-compiled app to do the pull off the tricks they are with this new OS," wrote one reader under the name Ktappe."
Now, assuming Apple is using this language to defeat the expectation that Flash is viable on the iPhone OS, who really loses? I would argue that elimination of Flash is win for everyone but Adobe, but that's my opinion. Even if you like Flash a lot, you can't fault Apple for not accommodating Adobe given the belligerent history between them.
I guess I just have a hard time mustering sympathy for Flash developers after years of frustrating, shoddy, inconsistent web experiences with Flash. There are a few exceptions (artists like http://yugop.com/ come to mind, as well as the acceleration of online video) but, overall, Flash has been a nightmare for opinionated web users like myself. Good riddance.
It's not the language, it's the framework. UIKit and friends really are very good; they're the secret sauce of the iPhone OS and I'm not sure Android has anything comparable.
(The framework itself needs to be implemented carefully to avoid Apple's ire. Apple itself may want to implement it, as it would put their Obj-C toolset in the position as the original, and other platforms get the copy.)
Apple doesn't like Flash (or Adobe, depending on preference).
Adobe develops Flash to iPhone compiler.
Apple bans anything-to-AppStore apps that aren't "originally written in C/Obj. C"
...
* Adobe writes Flash to Canvas/HTML5 Apps ?
Apple has nothing to lose from that cornered last step to get onto the iPhone... The internet as a whole doesn't have anything to lose...
For once in my life I feel like an Apple fan. It's a shame it only happened under the influence of alcohol.
Edit: I feel very dirty all of a sudden.
Oh? Raganwald seems to be ok with this, especially since he does his iPhone development on the web platform and doesn't need Apple's permission.
"Any real developer would not in good conscience be able to support this."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
One place where I do have issue with this policy is in the case of game engines/middleware (ie. Unity). Due to the complexity and development requirements of game middleware I think an exception, or a more refined policy, is required to allow middleware to give the required 'leg-up' to game developers. Additionally, while Apple has provided an awful lot of what developers need to create great View-based applications for the iPhone with Cocoa Touch (within the constraints what third-party apps are allowed to do, at least), they haven't done so for games. This is understandable, again due to the aforementioned complexity of game engines, but it makes games a special case.