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Adobe Evangelist Lashes Out Over Apple's "Original Language" Policy
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's recent decision to restrict the languages that may be used for iPhone and iPad development has provoked some invective from Adobe's platform evangelist Lee Brimelow. He writes on TheFlashBlog, 'This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple's devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won't allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe. This does not just affect Adobe but also other technologies like Unity3D.' He ends his post with, 'Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple. Comments disabled as I'm not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots.'"
Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.
....only allows you to speak English when using an Iphone.
It's Apple. For at least 10 years people have been saying that if Apple had MS's market share that things would actually be worse than they are now. Well, now we get a small hint of things to come. OTOH, perhaps Apple is so large now their left hand doesn't know what their right hand is doing.
Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad: "If you need to "originally" write your code in Swahili, while listening to Milli Vanilli, while reclining in a patch of mud, and then you need fifty oompa loompas to translate the Swahili into C, that is none of Steve Jobs fucking business. And the idea, which I am sure is actually the plan, that he will inspect application code to figure out what the "original" language is that the code was written in is just plain pathological."
What's more interesting to me is that Adobe is now under fire both from Microsoft, who has been trying to supplant all of their software with their own stack, and now Apple. It seems like the only friends Adobe has these days are Linux and Android.
So, hey, Adobe: have you started porting Photoshop yet?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.
This week, Slashdot featured a really good article form Slate that ended with this quote:
Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.
That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism? That's the real debate here.
My work here is dung.
Adobe can retaliate and abandon Mac platform. Designers and developers who need Adobe's products will move to Windows.
Except with the imminent death of Flash due to the ubiquitous adoption of the iP[hone|ad|od Touch], Photoshop is the major product Adobe is making money with, and that's primarily on Macs. Could they afford to abandon the platform is the real question.
But yeah, this is an elegant solution. If Photoshop were Windows only, a lot of graphic designers would end up abandoning Macs in the long run.
John
Apple hasn't forgotten the lesson they learned from IBM and others. Allowing developers to use proprietary tools like Adobe's Flash suite makes them dependent on Adobe's development cycle and not their own. Apple claims to have just released 1500 new API's for iPhone OS. How long will it take for Adobe to support them with their development tools? About as long is it takes to get a version of Flash for OSX that doesn't use 99% of the CPU? Or as long as it takes IBM to release a 3 GHz G5?
Not all issues surrounding control are negative. Sometimes it's just about controlling your own destiny and place in the market.
Seriously, what was Adobe thinking ? A good business relationship is when everyone gains from whatever is being proposed. Apple don't gain. Why are Adobe surprised Apple aren't happy ? This isn't *quite* as bad as Palm lying about their USB id's in order to piggy-back on Apple's success, but it's pretty darn close.
I can see the case for this being good for Adobe. I can't see the case for this being good for Apple; given that Apple are way out ahead in terms of mindshare at the moment, I don't think this is a bad thing for the users - developers are flocking to the platform.
If Adobe want to play, they need to bring something that excites the user-base, and that Apple can't refute. So far they've *not* done that, and childish rants aren't going to persuade me that they can, in fact, do that. I do love the "comments are disabled because someone might disagree with me" as well [grin] - that just smacks of someone firmly convinced they're in the right...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Apple locked down the iPhone app market to avoid the same late 80's video game crash, according to this page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250946 Let state that I am not an iPhone fanboi. I use the corporate iPhone for email and calendar, which it does well. It does infuriate me that I cannot make it do simple tasks like change notification volume that my POS Windows Mobile phone could. I would jailbreak it, but my boss told me "the IT department would probably junk punch him" if I did.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
Do you suppose Steve Jobs might still be upset about the long delays in Adobe's release of OSX/Intel native products?
Nah.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Actually, I read about this the other day. Rumor has it, the language requirements actually do have a purpose, that is making sure the apps work with the new profiled multitasking setups. Supposedly cross compiled apps don't behave in the same way and individual threads can't be halted to save battery and processing power the same way that native apps can.
Whether or not that is true is a bit above my head. The claim has been made that all of Apple's fancy tricks with threat pausing, fail completely with cross-compiled apps and as a result those apps perform very badly with regard to battery drain. This is somewhat supported by the fact that Apple has applied this only to the version of iPhone OS that includes multitasking and not to older versions including current development for 3.x.
Others have also faulted Gruber for misquoting them in his rant by claiming Unity3D will no longer be allowed, despite the fact that the person he was quoting said maybe it will or maybe it won't as it is actually a pre-compiler and it does create objective C source files. The rant should be taken with a grain of salt as it is from a fairly biased Adobe employee.
If it was anything other than Flash, and anyone other than Apple I'm sure more people would be outraged. To me this is more of Apple's and its control MO vs. the last decade's "rich internet architecture". Apple's doing what it always does, control its platform. I'm not sure why anybody's so surprised. I've been burned by the lock-in, lock-out myself (DISCLAIMER: I do own an Apple computer), but, I'm not going to cry myself to sleep over the marginalization of the Flash platform on the iPhone OS. I think most died-in-the-wool Apple users feel this way (ho hum/ meh), and Apple is willing to take advantage of this sentiment to further shape their own platform the way they want it. Right? Wrong? I don't think this is really a question of ethics or morals. I think it's Apple having their own way, and people with dollars not caring enough to get mad and go elsewhere.
First, Flash sucks for me as a user so I am thrilled it's going to die. Sorry if a few developers love it, but that's not my problem nor do I care if they have to learn new things. Thank you Apple.
Second, as an iPhone user there is nothing I miss on a daily basis being able to do with the iPhone. Do I wish that there was more flexibility with some apps? Yes. Do I think it's this huge deal, no. Fact is the control Apple is doing has benefits and negatives. For most people the benefits of a closed community, screened apps that haven't had viruses or malware, and a wonderful intuitive GUI (IMHO, Android is getting closer but is still not consistent nor as intuitive as iphone or Palm WebOs) and easy upgrades that actually are released to the phones (as opposed to the fragmentation that's Android) is worthwhile. Fact is Android Droid are STILL waiting for Verizon to let them get 2.1 of Android. How's that for control? If you want control, get yourself an out of contract pay as you go GSM type phone (like the Nokia or somethiing). But for the rest of us people who just need a smartphone and not a portable computer, the iphone is a great device.
Apple is lock-in. Adobe is lock-in. You have a choice of how you'll be locked in. What's the point of developing software?
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
However, they're probably not defenses that Adobe or people who support the general concept of "openness" would appreciate.
AppleInsider claims it's due to the new multitasking features in iPhone OS 4.0. I don't know if I fully buy that, though the argument that Apple's policy change is part of the 4.0 release seems to support the idea (if they merely wanted to cut out Adobe from the beginning, they could have changed their policy much earlier).
Personally, I think it's a UI-based decision. Apple's whole schtick is focused on a consistent interface that functions smoothly and easily to the end user, rather than trying to pack in as many little features as possible. (Feel free to debate the merits of this type of thinking; it's certainly not for everyone but it seems to be working for them.)
Apple does not want a flood of half-assed iPhone and iPad apps written in a "write once, run on any number of systems and interfaces" manner. In Steve's opinion, if you want sell an iPhone app, write an iPhone app, with all the care and diligence to the iPhone's interface which that entails. Now, I'm sure it would be possible to use Flash's cross-compiling feature to make some wonderful, perfectly native-UIed iPhone apps, but I'm also willing to bet that 99% of the time this feature would be used to half-assedly convert some Flash game to an iPhone game. Again, feel free to debate the merits of such a closed ecosystem, but you can't exactly claim there's no rational basis behind the rules.
People are jumping to too many conclusions here. Apple updated the developer terms, and has not confirmed that they will shut Adobe-compiled apps out. The compile-flash-to-iPhone feature from Adobe is vaporware anyway for now, as Adobe hasn't really shown it that publicly yet. Appleinsider is reporting that the ban is not from spite but for technical reasons; as cross-compiled code may interfere with the proper multitasking coming out in iPhoneOS 4.0.
I won't get mad at Apple until it's confirmed that they are shutting it out. Apple selectively enforces it's developer rules (they let Google's app through when it used private APIs), and Apple hasn't commented on the Flash-compiler controversy. No, a ranting Adobe evangelist has as little information as you or I do at the moment.
Is the Unity3D Game Engine threatened? I doubt it. Adobe, yes. Unity, no. I think this Adobe guy is reading between the lines of Apple's announcement. He knows Flash (its code generator workaround, not Flash itself) will be targeted, but not Unity3D. He's only trying to get Apple to admit its hidden agenda, or goad them into banning Unity3D to maintain consistency (which would only go against Apple's interests, Unity3D already has many top selling titles, the code generator from Adobe is not even close).
One thing Apple can never ever give you until they change their minds: Freedom.
You can't take it for yourself because it would equate with theft until they grant you permission.
There's not App for freedom.
In the real world, Safari (including on Mac OS X) only has around 5% market share. That's not ubiquitous at all. I think 'irrelevant' is the word you're looking for.
The only way Apple will stop strong arming Adobe is for them to suddenly pull Photoshop from Mac OS.
You don't think there's already a move by Adobe away from MacOS? Interesting. You clearly don't use Adobe's Creative Suite in your day job.
Many of us who do have noticed a distinct shift in their design philosophy away from making a Mac program for graphic designers towards making a PC program for graphic designers which happens to run on the Mac. The examples are small yet numerous and it paints a clear picture, to anyone who actually thinks about it for a second, that Adobe was the first to turn their backs on the Mac community. I believe there's been a cold war brewing behind closed doors for years now and, while Apple may have been the most obvious about bringing it into the light, Adobe was the first to act on it with their shift in design philosophy with CS3.
Apple just doesn't want lousy bloated code that is generated badly and lazily from some bloated Adobe app that probably costs a fortune.
XCode is free, Cocao touch and ObjC is much nicer to use than most mobile platforms (Symbian is horrid). Why buy some Adobe toolkit and churn out rubbish?
Developers for games consoles have to use the official SDK, why should a handheld gaming platform (that is also a phone) be any different?
Maybe because they know that Apple would produce a decent alternative to Photoshop for a fraction of the price?
Apple massively undercut Steinberg's Cubase when they released Logic Studio. No lame dongle protection either!
I'd guess they think the answer to that is "yes". I think they are very wrong about that, but it seems they don't value Apple custom. If they did, they wouldn't have delayed the intel versions of CS3 for a year. That definitely cost Apple in people upgrading to intel machines.
I dare say that's at least part of the reason why they are keen to kill flash. That, and the fact that Apple's ideology is all about user experience -- and Adobe's is very, very far from that.
Five Tremendous Apple vs. Adobe Flash Myths
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/10/five-tremendous-apple-vs-adobe-flash-myths/
A bit of his summary:
And so, through a mix of incompetence, belligerence and emotionalist hypocrisy, Adobe has been pumping a non-stop stream of propaganda about how critically important Flash is on mobile devices, even though millions of people been using the highest ranked smartphone for three years now without suffering any ill (not even the rest of humanity on lessor smartphones have missed being able to render desktop Flash content, because they haven’t been able to either). There’s a reason for all that talk: Adobe is terrified.
Somehow, developers have to realize that the iPhone, iPad (and in a certain way an iMac too) are no longer meant to be computers with an operating system. They are devices with an API. As far as I see these API's are trying to protect the devices (and the company and the users).
Get over it.
--------
* Sigh *
Just you wait. This is the year of GIMP on the desktop. Just like last year, and next year.
Strongly disagree.
Supporting bad long-term over-arching policies because they happen to work towards a small short-term result that you like is really a bad idea. In the end you'll just work against your own actual goals. For instance, presumably you dislike Flash because it is closed, proprietary, non-compliant, resource-intensive, or whatever. But promoting a ridiculous closed ecosystem will just mean that Flash will replaced with something just as closed, proprietary, non-compliant, or whatever.
Just be consistent, and explain exactly what you dislike about Flash, and what you dislike about Apple's policies.
Before I got flashblock, any site I would visit with flash adds would instantly send my processors to about %60, and the fans would start spinning (X3100 MacBook). The situation is even worse in Linux. Would you expect the flash runtime to be any better on the iPhone????
This is the exact same crap that Semantec pulled in the 90's with their 'java compiler', they advertised a java dev tool that I paid about 150$ for that claimed to produce native executables. Well, technically it did, they produced an giant executable, with the entire java interpreter statically linked in, and your code statically linked in, so at runtime it would just interpret your code using the linked in interpreter.
Same freaking thing that CS5 does.
All Apple it trying to do is limit the number of crap applications. If there are all of a sudden all kinds of apps built on flash, battery life drops to minutes, then people will be pissed and most likely blame apple, when its flash's fault.
And their probably is no way to even write a runtime for flash that will not drain battery, because flash is all timer based. The runtime needs to allocate all kinds of timers that are firing at a very fast rate, so there would be NO POSSIBLE WAY to suspend the app in a multitasking env.
I do think Apple went a bit too far, I think they should have allowed apps written in Python/Ruby or some other decent lang, but absolutely ban flash.
And BTW, what is more cross platform then C/C++ and Javascript???
Note, even if they somehow figured out a way to compile CraptionScript to native code, the fundamental problem is the TIMER /EVENT based programming model of flash, where the runtime creates a timer that fires every millisecond to tiger the animations and craptionscript events. CPU usage was not one of the design goals of flash, the fundamental design goal of it was to make obnoxious animations trivial by point and click development tools. Hogging CPU resources was fine I suppose on desktop machines with unlimited power resources, but its a no-go on devices with limited battery capacity.
since when have they had trouble defending stupid shit apple does?!
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If Adobe wants to, they can make their "compiler" a language engine that rewrites a flash/flex app in objective C. Apple doesn't want java apps and flash apps because they lose the unique look and feel of the device. Java apps look terrible on windows, mac and linux, because they live in their own interface world. Obviously an app that can be written once for all platforms is not good for Apple's business, but I think Jobs is more interested in making sure all the iApps, have the same distinct look and feel that makes iphones and ipads so intuitive.
When did it become OK to kill technology just because you don't like how it is used? How about beating it with better alternatives? The anti-flash sentiment on slashdot is truly irrational.
Thats exactly what happened here on /. when Operation Desert Fox started in 1998, Sengan posted a long rant of a story description and then said - comments disabled. I didn't know he was Adobe Evangelist now.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/12/16/1930206
If it is so easy to compete with Photoshop, why isn't anyone doing it and doing it good?
Actually, I'd say Pixelmator is pretty good competition, and one should not ignore Corel's offerings. I don't know anyone with quite as pricey and high-end of an offering, but I bet Apple could buy Pixelmator inexpensively and put some real hurt on Adobe with it in a few years of highly paid development.
Why would Apple succeed where several other have failed?
Apple has the money and the development expertise, especially if Adobe were to step out of the competition by abandoning all those on the Mac platform. Of course Adobe would never do that since it would be pissing off half of their customer base and losing them a pile of money (and probably get the CEO fired).
...no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control...
Well, maybe no rational defense other than not wanting apps that drag along a horribly crash-prone Flash runtime--extrapolating from experience with Flash on OS X.
Or, maybe no rational defense other than not wanting apps that are built for some kind of cursor device and will deliver a horrible user experience on a touch-only device.
Personally, I'll need to hear it at least a few more times. Could you please randomize the order so it doesn't look like the EU's anti-IE browser choice screen?
Just a thought.
When tens of thousands of Android phones get 0wned, due to some Flash exploit, for example, and at the same time, hundreds of thousands of iPhones don't get 0wned by any exploit, who do you think will be smiling quietly to himself at all the bad publicity towards Android & Google, and at the increase in stock price of Apple.
I don't care that the iPhone is locked down. I don't care that the iPad is locked down. I can write all the software I want for my several Macs here in my home. Not being allowed to do the same for an iPhone or iPad is not something that particularly troubles me.
If I may quote myself from some years back (with a slight rewriting):
You are not the target audience for the iPhone/iPad.
You have never been the target audience for the iPhone/iPad.
You will never be the target audience for the iPhone/iPad.
Really, you might as well be griping about the lack of Ogg Vorbis support in iTunes and the iPod for all the good your whining is going to do.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Apple is saying "you can only use C, C++, Objective C, and JavaScript as executed by the iPhone's JavaScript engine". No more, no less. This has fuck all to do with saving your platform from OMG EVIL PORTED GAMES. Poorly ported games are still possible under the new policy. And it applies to many, many things that aren't games. At best, this is an insane and stupid attempt to fuck over Adobe for little reason, and at worst, it's just insane and stupid. Either way, this isn't "good" by any metric that doesn't involve the RDF.
Don't worry though, I'm sure Apple will apply this rule arbitrarily and inconsistently, so you at least won't see the major applications that grossly violate it gone, but it will probably be lots of headaches for everyone else, and be yet another contributing factor to continuing to drive developers away from Apple's little walled garden of madness.
Actually, I read about this the other day. Rumor has it, the language requirements actually do have a purpose, that is making sure the apps work with the new profiled multitasking setups. Supposedly cross compiled apps don't behave in the same way
That's plausible (a little tenuous, but plausible) if you're talking about restrictions against using another toolchain to build your binary.
But section 3.3.1 also bans upstream tools that generate code consumed by Apple's toolchain. You can't write code in another language to write C/C++/ObjC code for you. Which means you're telling developers that they can't write tools that make their lives easier. What's the justification for that?
Here's an already popular iPad app essentially written using Mathematica:
Apparently it runs afoul if 3.3.1.
Frankly, it's not clear to me that every iPhone app doesn't run afoul of 3.3.1. Unless you actually think in C/C++/Objective C, every program is arguably first a set of cognitive abstractions in a human brain. Or, as this article puts it, with this restriction, "Apple may thus be the first company to bet the farm on Cartesian dualism."
There are other problems with Apple's approach.
Tweet, tweet.
Adobe wants to make Flash the platform for mobile devices.
Apple wants to keep application development native so the can control their own platform.
Both of these are reasonable goals.
Personally I would rather have native applications, than cross platform Flash-to-App generator.
If you think there is too much crapware in the Appstore now, what would it look like when every flash writer starts hitting "convert to iPhone button"?
So while I don't know if that wording change means that there will be no Flash-to-App conversion in the Appstore, I certainly hope that is the case.
I am sad that nothing can be done to keep it off Android...
As someone who has worked at Adobe and developed on the Mac - trust me - its a labor of love - its not nearly as easy as it is on Windows, Linux and even Solaris.
You don't develop on the Mac because of your insane sales figures on that platform. You don't develop on the Mac because of the tons of developer help they give you. You don't develop on the Mac because they even like you. You do it because ... you always have and you have customers to support.
Good example - they would release a patch on 10.4.x - that would break various things like printing (in minor ways - like custom doc sizes start failing), break drivers that work with our products and on and on and on. They never tested a single thing of ours when releasing anything - despite being their largest 3rd party software developer. We never got a single patch ahead of time - ever - to even do the testing ourselves.
Apple's announcement of Intel OSX caught us blindsighted (we found out the exact same second everyone else did), their announcement of not supporting carbon on 64bit was a surprise (caught mid development of CS4) - especially when they said it would be supported previously.
Radar bugs are a black hole - ask anyone who has filed one.
Compare that with Microsoft. They used to log bugs with us on Vista against things like Acrobat 4 - which we hadn't supported in 8 years. That sort of thing was really really really common. But it shows their commitment to making sure that apps from one of their largest 3rd party vendors ran perfectly on Vista when it shipped. And guess what? Despite all of Vista's issues - everything Adobe ran perfectly.
Microsoft used to pre-emptively notify us when the Windows crash reporter picked up a new problem, including their analysis of the issue. There has been more than one crash report they provided that I've personally seen lead to a bug fix in a patch.
Although I strongly condemn Apple's bullying tactics, I can only say that Adobe had this coming for a long time.
Back in the 80s, at the dawn of desktop publishing, Apple held a kind of symbiotic relationship with Adobe, Aldus, and Macromedia, the once-competing companies that eventually merged into today's Adobe. But somewhere in the late 90s Adobe started to drop the ball on Apple as they saw greener pastures in Windows Land. They started to invest much more in the development of the Windows versions of many of their products and Mac versions started to become second-class products.
Adobe even used Premiere as leverage against Apple, threatening to stop its development for the Mac, something that would have essentially kicked Apple out of the video editing market. That's why Apple bought and started heavy development of Final Cut (1999?). Adobe in fact pulled the plug from Premiere (2003?) until they realized that this has backfired on them making them loose a lot of the video market (2007?).
But perhaps the epitome of Adobe's contempt for Apple is Flash. if you think Flash for windows is crappy, you haven't seen the Mac version (or for that matter the Linux one). Macromedia Flash was equally good for Mac and Windows, but while the performance of the Windows version was kept almost acceptable, the Mac version became even more sluggish, processor intensive, and buggy.
Furthermore, Flash became probably the biggest security hole in Mac OS X. in the security update for January, 12 vulnerabilities were plugged. But seven of them were not really in the operating system but in the flash pluggin!
Again, I reject Apple's tactics. But with all this, it is not surprising that Apple doesn't want flash anywhere near their new products even if this kills their former ally. These two companies long ago lost any reason to trust each other, and now Apple is punishing Adobe for treating them with contempt.
Photoshop is at such an advanced state, that nobody would have a realistic alternative for many many years.
Except for the 90-10 problem. Photoshop may be a long way ahead of the competition, but the more advanced the program is, the fewer people actually need all of the features. Serious graphic designers do, but they're such a tiny proportion of the overall computing market that they don't make a difference in terms of hardware sales. Amateurs are a much larger, although still not huge, proportion, and they can probably manage with version of Photoshop from a decade ago, or any other product that does as much. Most other people would be happy with Paint Shop Pro 3, iPhoto, or even the GIMP.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Bottom line:
I'll be getting an iPad. I'll be upgrading my v1 iPhone to the new one that come out this summer.
And so will millions of others...
Lee Brimelow may be right, or he may not. I don't have time to read the article. But I will say that if he ever hopes to resolve the situation, as an Adobe employee complaining in public in an (apparently) official capacity, he's not helping the situation. This only adds to the bad vibes, and Steve is stubborn and this will only serve to bolster his resolve if it does anything at all.
In my personal experience Adobe products, especially CS4 and acrobat, have become unwieldy, bloated pieces of software on the Mac, and I know that acrobat on Windows is so big it's almost unusable. Maybe Lee should quit bitching about Apple and get on Adobe's developers to develop higher quality software. As a paying Adobe customer, I would appreciate that immensely.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
To all you said, you can add:
- No 64 bit Adobe products for the mac for a long time (next version will have it)
- Adobe not wanting to use cocoa and releasing carbon version of the mac products
We never got a single patch ahead of time - ever - to even do the testing ourselves.
I stopped reading here. Either you're a slick troll or Adobe is massively fucking incompetent (I'm not sure which might actually be true and it doesn't really matter). You're seriously claiming Adobe doesn't get the same access to pre-release updates that every other Mac developer gets?
I bet Adobe is quaking in their boots. Apple was able to produce an app better than Photoshop Elements.
Hail the Mighty Apple, who can defeat a crippled version of a competitor's app.
1997: Adobe wants Apple to pay workstation prices for Display Postscript licenses for the new OS, "Rhapsody", which would have completely priced them out of the market. Apple has to rewrite the graphics layer for Rhapsody/OS X, and it's delayed 2-3 years.
2010: Payback is a bitch.
Like MS demanding Win7 apps be written in a managed language (ie C#) or Android in Dalvik/Java. iPhone demands C/C++/ObjC. What's the big deal here?
First, I think you mean Windows Phone 7, not Windows 7.
Second, WinPhone7 and Android only "demand" that your compiled program conform to a certain virtual machine spec. You don't have to use their tools or write in their preferred languages; you can use any language that compiles to the right format. (And in fact, Android has a native development kit now, so you can write 99% of your app in any language that compiles to ARM!)
Third, Apple's demand goes even further than the demand you're falsely ascribing to MS and Google. They don't just demand that you have C/C++/ObjC code for your program -- they also demand that your program be originally written in one of those languages.
Let's take a trip down memory lane. In the early 80s, there were no direct C++ compilers: instead, there was something called cfront, which translated C++ code into C. It would be strange for an OS vendor to demand that applications be written in C, of course, because all that really matters is whether the compiled program can run on the hardware. But it would be batshit insane for an OS vendor to prohibit programs that were originally written in C++ and then translated to C, because even if there were some legitimate reason to require C code, it would apply to all C code. There would've been absolutely no technical justification for that ban, just like today there's no technical justification for banning programs translated from Flash to Objective-C.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Owning the APIs has proven time after time to be where the money is at. Microsoft has written that in stone. If there's one thing Steve Jobs, et. al. have learned, is: don't sit on your ass and let somebody else run away with your golden goose. They let Microsoft run away with it once. So did IBM. Which is why he gets it, the lesson is learned - if you let another platform take over your device, you lose any control over the quality of the experience.
You go on about 'we're developers we just want to provide a tool'. Do you really trust your non-developer (maybe you forget once upon a time, Jobs wrote software too) executives at Adobe don't get the power they have to mint money with their platform? To open their own open app store? To begin to charge a per-end-user licensing fee for the next version of the flash compiler for the iphone, once its indispensible?
Let's look at the facts. There's tons and tons of people out there that have some Flash experience and some with actual professional training, and lots without either that can manage to produce something with Flash. Let's call these Flash people "flashies". I'm not comfortable calling them developers, programmers or coders, out of respect to the people that really are. Some very well may be, but if we're going to draw a Venn diagram of Flashies, we all know that's a fairly small percentage of the set that gets to overlap into Software Engineer or Developer. I'm taking the middle road, nothing derogatory.
So these Flashies are out there; they can pound out some moving pictures and stitch it together to do something. Great. See what's happened in Android? You've got a load of crap out there. Steve doesn't like a load of crap. He's trying to do something different than the load of crap permeating the Microsoft ecosystem.
Also, I really appreciate your remarks about how open the Adobe culture is, when obivously your boss said, edit that shit on your blog right now, even if you did say, its' my own personal opinion.
So you are the SWF evangelist. You have drunk the SWF kool-aid. I suppose I might have drunk the Tim Berners-Lee kool-aid. Your platform is not an open standard. Nobody has to give it due respect just because the tools are easy to get started on. Just like some people are visual learners, some are visual Flashies. Cool, y'all seem to have developed a tool to target SWF whether a Flashie is visual, ore more technical. That's neat. You're tools are pretty cool. It would be cooler if you'd open your format up. I know, that would allow competitors an even keel to compete with you on your tools, but hey, that's better for Flashies.
You aren't just buildling the tools. You are selling a proprietary platform too. So is Apple. A lot of their code is open source, and free software at that. And a lot of it isn't. They are competing against RIM & Microsoft and Google for all the marbles right now. Adobe is on all of their radars now as coming hard after the platform. You don't think the Adobe executives let the Flash team go and spend all that development time on the compiler out of the goodness of their hearts, or because it would be paid for by selling the tools to developers. No, there's a lot more craft in the economics of that business decision.
Also, you guys could be bought by Microsoft or Google tomorrow or two years from now, and really fuck Apple in the ass. The scenario: lots of great killer apps are running on your SDK for the iPhone, the apple sdk is no longer in the mindshare of developers... then Microsoft or Google, hai, we bought it, dead now. *poof* the app marketplace is disrupted and the platform dies. Your market cap of $20 billion dollars is fuck you money to those guys. Sorry.
Yeah, when there's this much money involved, and the dynamics are such: it's happened before and it will happen again. All the strategy thinkers at Adobe, Apple, RIM, Google, and Microsoft have learned the lessons from mistakes made by Apple and IBM in launching, and letting platform be marginalized or wrested by a thir
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
"Adobe even used Premiere as leverage against Apple, threatening to stop its development for the Mac, something that would have essentially kicked Apple out of the video editing market. That's why Apple bought and started heavy development of Final Cut (1999?). Adobe in fact pulled the plug from Premiere (2003?) until they realized that this has backfired on them making them loose a lot of the video market (2007?)."
What nonsense. Premiere, though the highest volume seller among editing suites at the time, was not preferred among professionals and had little marketshare on the Mac. The Mac was losing ground rapidly to NT because the PowerPC sucked and MacOS sucked. The apps that gave MacOS its video-editing swagger were leaving Mac for Windows. Apple had to introduce it's own suite to salvage any hope of remaining relevant in that market. Adobe was going to drop Premiere for Mac eventually anyway, the Final Cut move just made it obvious.
When marketshare sucks as bad as Apple's did at the time, and the platform technology hopelessly behind as well, companies like Adobe are looking for leverage against a dying partner, they simply don't give a crap.
" But somewhere in the late 90s Adobe started to drop the ball on Apple as they saw greener pastures in Windows Land. They started to invest much more in the development of the Windows versions of many of their products and Mac versions started to become second-class products."
Here you've given away your fanboy perspective. Wouldn't you invest more into a market that's generating the bulk of your sales? What do you think they owed Apple anyway?
"But with all this, it is not surprising that Apple doesn't want flash anywhere near their new products even if this kills their former ally."
You haven't even touched on the reasons for this. It's not about lack of loyalty, business infidelity, or product bugginess, it's about Jobs's need to control all software that runs on the platform. With flash, applications can be downloaded and run on demand inside a browser. Apple can't have that.
None of my friends at Apple are on the iPhone or iPad teams, or in senior management, so who knows for sure... But the common rumor going around the rest of the company is that Steve took the "no 64-bit CS for Macs" thing as something of a personal slap in the face. Adobe, if you'll remember, rathar cravenly waited until Steve's health was especially precarious to pull that stunt.
The rumor mill also goes that once CS is natively 64-bit on Macintosh, and after a suitable period of pennitance, a new round of security and performance testing will show that Flash is finally in a state suitable for iPhone OS.
I'd guess they think the answer to that is "yes". I think they are very wrong about that, but it seems they don't value Apple custom. If they did, they wouldn't have delayed the intel versions of CS3 for a year. That definitely cost Apple in people upgrading to intel machines.
Everything I've read about that is that Apple blindsided Adobe on the change. Adobe found out when everyone else did -- when Apple announced it. It's kinda hard to blame Adobe for the delay when Apple didn't even tell them about it ahead of time. A former Adobe Mac developer has already posted the same info in an earlier thread. (It's anonymous coward so take it as you may, but I have read the same thing other places in the past so I believe it.)
I can think of one - stability.
If they dont keep control of development of applications, then it will become a nightmare where they will be blamed for every bad app. To the user, the app is the device, and the device is the app.. they dont know the difference and apple gets the blame.
So, keeping tight reigns on this helps keep that risk at a minimum.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yes, someone recalls the past :)
MS and Apple got "expletive deleted" on fonts fees.
MS and Apple found a way out and moved on with fonts escaping the expected "revenue stream" trap.
Finally Apple can break away from the gift of free buggy "trojan horse" like Adobe code.
Open standards and/or in house DMR are the dreams of a MS and Apple.
Why pay some 3rd party developer to profit long term on your OS for shipping the same old code year after year.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
> Here's hoping you expected no different from any proprietor.
Except Apple just managed to find a new low to sink to.
They took the SOP for console gaming and managed to pull something that's even lower.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
1: Neither Nintendo or MS made any pretences about how open their development is
Nor does Apple, the agreement after all must be signed before you can begin developing.
they've actively forcibly removed a popular method of coding games by a company they're competing with (hello anti-trust!)
anti-trust might make some small degree of success (well not really but let's pretend) if APPLE WROTE GAMES. They just provide the platform, you are quite free to continue to write games, just using the tools that Apple OK's. There's no anti-trust involved whatsoever.
Without Flash it isn't the complete web.
When you enter Flash you left the web. When I can't arbitrarily highlight text that is text and not an image, I have left the web. When the whole browser settings as to font size and such have no effect, I have left the web.
Flash is not the web.
4: Anti-trust. Look it up.
Take your own advice. Adobe can produce HTML 5 tools. They can even produce Objective-C tools. Heck, they can even produce tools that produce iPhone binaries, but in that case since Apple can't manage the backend compilation Apple will also not distribute them. But you could ship them out to jailbreakers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think the perfect Apple product would be beautiful and designed to be closed but easy to unlock. The iPhone's seemingly easily jailbroken security is close but their developer restrictions are sometimes ridiculous.
First not allowing interpreted code. WTF does that mean? It's not okay to embed Prolog in your program but you can use HTML, SQL, Javascript, and XML? What about Java bytecode? What about objects that are highly configurable to the point where they are basically scripted? What if I store a game level as a bitmap the user can edit? Very fuzzy ground with little point.
Now this whole not allowing code written in another language to be translated into Objective-C? So long as the code is valid Obj-C how would they know? How is it different than hand translated code? Is hand translated code okay? Why? This is a completely stupid rule. If they are just seeking to avoid slow/suck code why don't they test the app during the review process instead of making stupid rules? I don't want Flash on the iPhone/iTouch/iPad because Flash sucks. If they can translate it into Obj-C that doesn't have the issues Flash usually has then I'm all for it. Why get in a pissing match with Adobe over the issue. Why force people to use suck-ass Objective-C. Again how is this different than if I make a program that has an engine that lets you declare and configure objects from saved settings (say in a db or XML) and then initialize the Obj-C objects in the engine from those at runtime? (I've actually done that - seems pretty normal not to hardcode such things.)
Making rules that go against common programming practice that are very close to unenforceable is just stupid.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
As someone who has worked at Adobe and developed on the Mac - trust me - its a labor of love - its not nearly as easy as it is on Windows, Linux and even Solaris.
We never got a single patch ahead of time - ever - to even do the testing ourselves.
All developers receive Apple's patches and OS updates ahead of time. WELL ahead of time. If you're going to have an anti-Apple agenda, at least try to sound credible.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
That's absurd. The only way to correctly use this new multitasking API is by directly coding your program in C? A native C application is just a heap of machine code. How is a program compiled in any other language any different? Or how about another language translated to C then compiled natively?
I honestly find it hard to believe that these restrictions are necessary.
I too have developed for 'both sides' not for Adobe a different 'lower tier' company. The PC is 'easier'. MS is amazing bend over backwards for the developers. Apple has always been amazingly bend the developers over. The difference you missed in your 'skipping the rest' was the fact that adobe is the 3rd largest software vendor out there in the MS world. Then how did they find out about the intel move? An 'oh btw' in a keynote?! MS does *NOT* ignore them. Apple on the other hand is very 'well we put some stuff on the web site dig it up yourself, or here are our press releases... good luck'.
I have dealt with Apple and MS in getting 'support'. MS was always top notch work and they do not stop until it is resolved. Apple I always felt like 'how dare I bother them with such trivialities'.
Ever wonder why Apple went from the 90% market share in the early 80's to the 5% it is now? Its because they have always treated their 3rd party devs like crap. Even the top tier ones. Photoshop was pretty much *THE* only app keeping them alive in the 90s and Apple comes back and treats them like crap. They have changed out the whole platform about 20 times over the years and then just go 'oh well sucks to be you HAHAHA'. Then wondered why no one wanted to make hardware or software for them.
Honestly MS's business practices make me sick. But Apple is the zen guru master Bill Gates takes tips from.
I can understand why they are forcing the API thing and sticking to it. They want the devs to 'just recompile' and it works or at least works quickly on the iPhone version 20 with the new cpu arch that they switched out too. This means you play Apples game. You play it their way. You *WILL* however get burned at some point by it. I can name at least 10 companies off the top of my head who thought as you did. These were multimillion dollar per year companies that were 'gone' overnight because of some change in the wind at Apple. These were hardcore 'we only develop for Apple' shops. Use them as a business partner at your peril.
The computer industry put MS on top because Apple and IBM was just that shitty to deal with. We were willing to look the other way when it did monopoly type things (eventually it became too much). It looks like a whole new set of developers needs to learn the lesson again 'deal with Apple and you will get burned eventually'.
I remember the day Apple dropped all support for 3rd party OS install. All of my fellow developers looked like Apple had taken their puppy away. Within 2 months we were all looking for jobs. No one was buying Apple software anymore. Why should they when a equiv PC was half the price?
People got tired of the Apple treadmill. Every 2-4 years totally changing out software and hardware. People want a bit more platform stability out of computers. Even if they buy them every 6 months.
I can buy a piece of software from the mid 90s written for windows and have a pretty good shot at it working. I can not do that with a Mac. I guarantee in 5 years all those cool apps you bought for your iPhone will not work anymore unless you keep the same phone. I understand that computers progress. But Apple needs to stop changing the platform. Hell you could say they changed it again with the iPhone.
You nailed it perfectly. I never knew a hacker who cut his/her teeth on a Mac in the 80's. They were overpriced machines for yuppy "desktop publishers".
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
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.
Bullshit.
For starters, C, C++ and Obj-C all compile to native code. Native code is native code - if you have some magic pixie dust "multitasking analyzer" for that, it just works, whatever it is compiled from. There is no "foreign structure" to speak of.
If the said magic analyzer would rely on code patterns produced by a particular compiler, then breaking it would be as easy as changing optimization flags, and every GCC upgrade would result in massive breakage all along the line. It is an architectural decision that is so stupid it cannot even be seriously contemplated.
Furthermore, Apple doesn't restrict just compilers that compile from some-other-language to native. No, they restrict code translators that "compile" from some-other-language to C/C++/Obj-C. If the aforementioned magic analyzer can handle output of GCC, it shouldn't have any trouble witht hat.
Furthermore, Apple also bans wrapper frameworks that can be used for cross-platform development. At this point the intent is perfectly clear - note that the use of frameworks isn't forbidden as such, it's the intent that matters. Of course, the aforementioned multitasking analyzer being powered by the Reality Distortion Field, it may well be affected by mere thoughts...
Finally, and most importantly, there is no "evaluation of apps", because there is still no multitasking for apps. All multitasking there is in iPhone OS 4 is a bunch of stock daemons, all written by Apple and shipped with the phone, that provide certain very specific services. Third-party applications are simply shut down if you switch away from them, though they are given the opportunity to persist their state, and queue any finalization tasks for background processing (that's what one of the daemons is for).
Not that I expect the various MS/Adobe/Android astroturfers and other Apple-haters to accept this. They're not big on rational explanations when it interferers with their world view.
You might want to try rationally explaining your own world view, first. A good place to start would be going point-by-point through this reply.
They only release dot releases on the developer site right? I don't think I've ever seen a pre-release for a security fix.
Let me correct that:
Microsott = Evil
Apple = Evil
Google = Somewhat less evil