Steve Jobs Weighs In On iPhone Programming Language Mandate

Dotnaught writes "Greg Slepak, founder of software company Tao Effect, wrote Apple CEO Steve Jobs to complain about Apple's mandate that iPhone applications be originally written in C/C++/Objective-C. Job's response was to endorse a post by John Gruber on the Daring Fireball blog. Jobs called it 'very insightful,' suggesting Gruber's prediction that third-party iPhone development tools are out might be right. Jobs sent a second reply that also doesn't bode well for third-party iPhone development tools: 'We've been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.'"

Comments

Re:Old trick

[Anonymous Coward]

Compile to C is banned. The policy is not a technical requirement, it's a contract. You can't get access to the Apple App Store without agreeing not to use intermediate layers. If your code is created in something other than Objective C, C or C++, you're in violation of that agreement, even if at some point all of it is represented in C code. Steve Jobs is a benevolent dictator and he has just extended his reach into your toolkit. (Captcha: soviet, how fitting)

Re:They want devs to choose

[digitalchinky]

I'm guessing you are American, the IPhone is a tiny player in the rest of the world - a world that is dominated by Nokia, SE, LG, and Samsung for the most part, though there are many other manufacturers. In Asia the Chinese knock offs are extremely popular.

Now that said, if you were to venture away from the self delusional 'free phone mentality' and just bought something outright, you would find even in America, a vast array of hardware to choose from. Hardware without all the draconian operator restrictions programmed in.

Re:None of this would've happened...

[Mr. Spontaneous]

But let's talk more about the Flash Player on the Mac. If it is not 100% on par with the Windows player people assume that it is all our fault. The facts show that this is simply not the case. Let's take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video that we released with Flash Player 10.1. Here you can see some published results for how much the situation has improved on Windows. Unfortunately we could not add this acceleration to the Mac player because Apple does not provide a public API to make this happen. You can easily verify that by asking Apple. I'm happy to say that we still made some improvements for the Mac player when it comes to video playback, but we simply could not implement the hardware acceleration. This is but one example of stumbling blocks we face when it comes to Apple.

From http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641

Re:Additional layers have nothing to do with this

[Anonymous Coward]

Forcing me to use a specific programming language is insane. Imagine Microsoft demanding all windows apps to be written only in C# and compiled only with Visual Studio. It would be an outrage. But hey, it's Steve Jobs, the Big Brother himself, and he knows what's best for us, right?

Is this asinine? You are aware Microsoft is demanding all Windows Phone 7 apps be written in C#/Silverlight, right? I may not agree with their move, but to say it puts them alone on a pillar of evil seems to show your own bias more than any factual opinion.

You are confusing platform with development tools. Apple is banning cross-platform development tools, even if they produce valid code for the platform. Microsoft is doing no such thing. If you have a development tool able of producing both Flash, Silverlight and iPhoneOS versions of your app. Microsoft will accept it, Apple will not.

Re:They want devs to choose

[LordVader717]

They don't have to be a monopoly to break the law.

Re:They want devs to choose

[nametaken]

I can write apps for android on ANY platform.