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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.'"
By restricting the use of abstraction layers, they want to make devs choose between writing their app for the iPhone or for Android, it would seem (or, of course, writing it twice).
Of course, the real choice is "write for iPhone, or write for every other platform". I hope developers are bright enough to see where this is going.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
That's only because Flash is strapped with new features that really don't fit well with the medium, although it has helped bring streaming video to the net (still doesn't make it a proper fit). Stuff like Neurotically Yours and badgers, otoh, are a perfect fit for the medium.
(Semi)Complex games and full streaming HD video? Not so much.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
As if the Microsoft monopoly wasn't bad enough in the 90's, now we get a modern-day Apple one that makes Microsoft pale in comparison. As Apple gains market share (and they are), this type of attitude is 180 degrees away from where development should be heading.
Just like the kid in the neighborhood who owns the ball determines the rules of the game.
You don't like it that way? The solution is simple:
Don't play in that game, and . . .
. . . find a different ball and game that has rules that you like.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Most geeks don't, at least when it comes to the iphone. However, for most of the population, the requirements are different. They are not worried about "openness" (or Linux would have a much larger market share) but want something with a slick UI and is easy to use.
Speaking as someone who has to deal with 64 bit flash on linux and has had to deal with all manner of MS enforced formats on the the mac, I completely and utterly agree with this part. Apps running using native platform tools do fairly well, cross-platform apps suck a lot of the time. You windows users have seen this too -- itunes, quicktime and safari are dogs on windows because they had to import all their own libraries. On Apple machines these are lighweight apps that are fast. On windows it just doesn't work as well. And let's face it, as nice as open software is, working well is what sells units, ideology is secondary.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps
Right. That's why all those games built with engines and level editors and scripting tools always suck. C'mon apple. You have to allow unity. You can't want games but require everyone to make them from scratch.
Afraid that cool unity game will show up on pc, wii, xbox, android, Mac, myspace? It'll be just like the 90's when the pc was gaming heaven and mac users got to play marathon for 11 years.
Keep in mind that actual Flash apps written by CS5 beta testers have been approved in Apple's app store in the past as well as many games written with Unity3D, so it's not like performance is a problem.
Since every app is checked against objective (and subjective) criterias, it would have been OK to just reject poorly written applications.
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?
Also, the timing was devious - on Friday, just before the Monday's official release of Adobe's CS5, effectively giving them no time to react. I was never a big fan of Adobe (especially before the Macromedia acquisition - their corporate culture started to change afterwards) but this is simply Steve Jobs being a big dick.
Finally, I know that many /.-ers are against Flash. Keep in mind however that this move goes well beyond Flash, affecting other tools and frameworks. If successful, this move will lead to more and more closed ecosystems (from other vendors as well). Today's Apple makes Microsoft look like saints.
It's horrible. I'd like my framework methods to b less than 30 characters long, please. Sorry to promote MS here, but I happen to like method names like OnInit and OnLoad.
So those reasons (and the MVC pattern) are the strongest you have to think that Cocoa is "god-awful"?
And none of that was meant for flash. It was meant to be a way to provide animated effects to a website. It wasn't meant to be the entire website (many, many issues there to include no ability to deep link). Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Phones aren't gaming consoles. Yet they are used as one now. Does that make games a good fit for phones? No, it just means you can do it. I didn't say the games weren't good. I said they aren't a good fit for the medium (which is poorly supported on any non-Windows platform).
All I see is you making my point for me. "Flash supports this and flash supports that." Big whoop. That's like my above example of the phone as a gaming platform. Sure you can play games on it, but seriously. Why would you? Controls are a pain (and really not any better with full qwerty keyboards) and the screen size, even for something like the iPhone or Android, is TINY. What is a phone good for? Making phone calls and storing numbers. Period. Just because phones have tried to expand past that doesn't make that a good decision, just a popular one.
I'm all about expanding and moving beyond limitations, but Flash, at it's base, is an over-glorified animation program just like the modern cell phone is at it's base an over-glorified communications device.
You want HD video? Use a proper video codec. You want to play games? Use a proper platform (PC or dedicated console). You want some cute animations that turn into viral memes? Use Flash all you want. Want to make phone calls from anywhere? Get a cell phone.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
And the economics of a closed fully controlled platform, have been in Steve's dreams since the seventies. Luckily we all know it will ultimately utterly fail, as so many closed platforms in the past. It will take a while. It might be hard for hackers such as us, but we will prevail! Sad to see Apple go down like this, was a big fan, contributor, promotor, book writer, journalist and so on for years.
I am really disappointed in Steve. At least Google tries a little bit to 'do no evil', Steve makes beautiful things, but with a very bitter taste! Facebook group: iPad is an attack on our freedom
I happen to like Objective-C and the Cocoa framework. It's method names are quite descriptive and don't leave much guesswork on what they do. Incidentally, there are short method names too for things that are easy to describe in short names. You don't have to use the MVC pattern if you don't want to. It's just more convenient to work with API the way it is designed to be used.
Have you ever used flash? It's slow as hell, shutters on pal resolution movies even, and often uses 100% of the CPU Time of one of my cores in my 8 Core Mac Pro. WHEN IDLE! The flash platform is a pile of CPU eating crap, I can't imagine how anyone would use that voluntarily. On an iPhone it'd probably eat away all battery power within less than an hour.
I doubt there are many people in "dev base" who are affected by that. After all, for a long time, the mandated tools were the only ones that were able to create applications, so most of the developers are already using them.
I'm an ex C++ developer, who has worked in Javaland for the last 5 years, or J2EE or whatever the fuck they call it now. I don't see any benefit from GC apart from barely educated Javaschool (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html) graduates writing bloated, slow and misguided code, resulting from their complete misunderstanding of the JVM and basic memory allocation.
I'll take boost's shared_ptr and OBJ-C's autorelease any day.
Please don't send a Word document when a text file will do the job.
Why do people always come up with that ridiculous argument? Apple provides tones of low level frameworks such as Accelerate.framework, OpenCL.framework and similar[1]. What more could you want? Running as root to renice yourself? Come on... The reason Flash sucks is because Adobe just doesn't care enough to make it not suck. [1] http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/navigation/index.html#section=Topics&topic=Performance
All modern games are written to game engines or game libraries that this rule would (does) exclude. The unreal engine, the PopCap engine and SDL all call the iPhone through an abstraction layer, which is not allowed. But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, in a strict interpretation, designing your game in sudo code is also not allowed.
The article summary misinterprets the core of what Gruber was arguing. He was speculating Apple didn't care so much about languages, it was more cross-platform frameworks they were after - so the subtle distinction is that systems that either converted other languages to objective-c or targeted the platform directly might be allowed. For instance, Mono for the iPhone lets you build applications in C#, but with bindings into the Cocoa frameworks.
Unity (popular game engine) might seem like a grey area, but if Apples motivation is quality of applications you simply cannot ban game engines, sine everyone having to write an engine from scratch would lower, not raise, overall quality. If for no other reeason than the pull of the game industry game engines should be OK.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And feel free to use your freedom of speech to argue against a policy you don't agree with, that you don't want to catch on more widely, and that you hope will be changed if enough outcry is raised.
Except that Apple ships a highly optimised H.264 CODEC as part of OS X. If they used that, instead of shipping their own, then it would be much faster. If you grab an H.264 movie and play it in QuickTime on a Mac, the CPU load is under half that of playing it in Flash. It's not that Apple doesn't provide APIs for doing it, it's that Apple doesn't provide APIs for doing it the way Adobe wants to do it, which is an entirely different complaint.
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Basically, hogwash. Having one language and one tool chain leads to fewer methods of being able to solve problems, and reduces the utility of your computer system. Now instead of being able to use a .5mm slot head screwdriver, all I have a big ol' sledge hammer. There really is no "computer science" basis for Apple's decision. There is a marketing reason or two, though:
1. Eliminate cross platform development tools and lock in developers and users to your platform.
2. Ensure you can always put out better stuff than independent software vendors by pulling a Microsoft and adding new (undocumented or unreleased) libraries to the OS and then using the libraries to produce more functional, better integrated software than ISVs can.
3. It's easy to kill off competition or those doing things you don't like with the platform by introducing incompatibilities in system libraries.
The rest of your post, while interesting is basically speculating that Apple will create some whiz-bang complier that will solve all of the remaining big problems in computer science. I wish Apple luck, and I hope they solve at least two or three of the big challenges.
A note on languages: Objective-C does not make for instant parallelism as you still have to fix the giant game of whack-a-mole that goes on with shared memory and have a more effective way of communication between processes/threads/whatever you want to call 'em. Providing some metadata might help, but it's no magic bullet.
-- $G
The Gruber blog highlights the Mac Kindle app built with the QT toolkit as an example of problems of cross platform libraries causing bad user experiences. He seems quite rankled by the OK button being not quite the right size and text ever so slightly clipped. This would appear to be the fault of a lazy programmer rather than "evil QT".
I don't remember having looked closely at the OSX style guidelines but my few QT applications have the approved order of "OK" and "Cancel" and all of my elements are properly aligned and not clipped. I would hazard a guess that the native design tools do not make it impossible to make a badly designed or non-conformant GUI.
I think Jobs has erred in highlighting 3rd party programming tools as the source of problems based on Gruber's pedanticism. The only great apps that are native have been written by the big companies that can afford to spend the extra effort on a single platform.
We all know that in the future Adobe will give in, Flash will be "enhanced" especially for Apple products and it will immediately become absolutely vital for web browsing according to the Job's reality distortion field.
Does a single thing you said explain why they won't allow frameworks which compile to Objective-C?
That's where I'm having trouble. I can see a technical reason to force people to use a single language, or at least a single runtime representation, in the same way that, say, the new Windows Mobile forces you to use .NET. I don't see any technical reason for them to care what language you originally use to produce it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's up to the end users to decide where the line should be drawn.
Forcing developers away from cross-platform frameworks won't garauntee that apps won't be crap.
It will help discourage development for other platforms though.
If Microsoft suddenly decided to ban likes of QT, these Apple Cult faithful would be all over Microsoft like stink on a pig. They would be the first to scream the loudest that this sort of thing is wrong and abusive.
It's not up to Big Brother, it's up to the individual citizen.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Is Apple actually calling iTunes for Windows for a sub-standard app? That perhaps should be banned from the platform? Apple themselves are using non-native API intermediate layers such as CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics in their implementation of iTunes for Windows.
Yes, iTunes for Windows is a sub-standard app... for the Windows platform.
Compared to other Windows apps (which are already not great feats of engineering), the iTunes app really sucks in many areas - slow startup, unresponsive UI whenever it is busy, non-standard UI elements, etc.
Jobs understand very well these downsides are exactly what you get for putting an intermediate layer to help support multi-platforms - the apps will suck except possibly for the primary platform (if any) of the intermediate layer. And Apple doesn't want such apps on the iPhone, they would rather have the app not available than have a sucky one. You know, some might consider this quality control.
As for banning, well, the platform is Windows, perhaps you should ask Microsoft if they care about sucky apps on their platform?
Oliver.
So how long until Apple creates an App Store for OS X, and forces Developers to only write Apps in Objective C, under NDA?
Thin client apps should not be affected by this since you would already be coding your interfaces separately for each platform for a native look and feel and having the major grunt work done on the server.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It funny for a technical site, no one is trying to look at this from the technical side of things. If you look at most CROSS platform libraries, you find that they always have to go to the lowest common
features. Most CROSS libraries do not expose the OS threading model, they implement threads them self. This is what java had in the beginning, (They used to be call green threads, I am not even sure if they are not still used under windows.) With Flash, I don't ever recall that under linux I saw multiple threads associated with it. (though it may be that nobody does threaded Flash apps, I don't
know.) Now, with the way that Apple is implementing background threads, seem like they are relying on the way they do threading. So if a Cross Library is doing
their own threading, or no supporting it at all, I think apple multitasking will be going out the window. So by limiting that you have to program in C/C++/OBJ-C and directly to their API they can have
better control on how they handle background tasks, and task switching. Remember they have a limited amount of memory (In today's terms), and no place to swap changed code out, I think they are
able to swap out the executable parts (to/from the executable). But need to keep the amount of active code in memory to a limit. With Apple's API they know all the threads that are running and
all the memory each thread has acquired. With some CROSS API it may expose only a single thread to Apple, they have no clue what can be run in the background, they can only do the entire
app.
Everyone is saying Apple is saying 'Screw you to Adobe', I don't believe it, I think they are making it where they are trying to produce the best experience for the end user, and decided that CROSS
libraries and Cross languages are just not feasible to support under the Multitasking environment. This is some of the same reasons why they banned Java. And I am sure this will ban MacRuby and
all the other Cross languages. So as programmers, if all you know is Flash, I will say you are not a true programmer, programmers like to learn new languages all the time, so get off you but and
learn OBJ-C, and the API.
(FLAME ON) So, all the whiners, and Flash lovers, go play on android, all I think it can do is help Apple in the long run. When people start putting all those Flash apps on their phone and find that the
phones start getting slower and slower as they put stuff in the background, and the iPhone keeps it's smooth performance. (FLAME OFF)
'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.'"
Take a look at any app on the Mac that uses Qt to generate the UI. Apple has seen plenty of instances of shallow ports of Windows or X11 apps to the Mac, and they're flat-out painful.
If you can't be bothered to learn the native development tools to write iPhone and iPad apps, then don't let the door hit you on the way out. Somehow, the iPhone market will just have to get by with the tens of thousands of developers who aren't trying to live in a little C# bubble.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I've worked for a company that produced a fully automated Java-to-Obj-C and Java-to-Brew translator and we've place app in the AppStore's top ten several times.
We take the Java bytecode and generate and intermediate representation that can then be used to re-create, say, Objective-C or C++ (BREW) code (once again: we've put several apps in the top ten on the AppStore). Of course we were also shipping on BREW and Android.
How can they detect the process is automated?
I mean, heck... We generate frakking Objective-c SOURCE CODE.
What can they dew? Ask us to hand over the source code and see that it hasn't been typed by a thousand monkeys?
Having one language, so long as it's turing-complete, shouldn't give you fewer methods to solve a problem. Now, if you're locked into a single language it would probably make it difficult to find a pre-existing library that might assist you.
I agree that there's no computer science basis for Apple's decision, but then again, Apple doesn't make their decisions based on computer science, they base them on business.
Learn something new.
Not really. Banning Quicktime on Windows wouldn't affect Apple users at all, unless they have an iPhone on Windows. But then you were talking about some sort of "Apple Cult" who presumably wouldn't have a Windows box as the home machine for their iPhone.
I have had first hand experience of "lazy development" - and I can understand why it was done. This is the use of the Cider wrapper to port games to OS X. I can see why some game companies go this route - it's cheaper than writing native code, but the result has universally sucked. This further enhances the stereotype that the Mac performs poorly for games (when it's the poor emulation of a windows box, with the Windows version of the game inside the wrapper causing the issue).
Poorly cross platform code makes all of the alternative platforms look bad, except the original. It can be done right, and in the case of the iPhone we're not talking about emulation per se, but the point is similar. We know the App Store is already controlled - why is it such a surprise that a language requirement could be added? While it may be a little annoying for developers, ultimately if it makes the user experience better, it has succeeded.
What goes on under the bonnet really doesn't concern the end user - only the final quality of the product. The PS2 was a *dog* to develop for, with a complex and difficult dev process, but the devs put up with it because the quality of the output was outstanding (for the consoles of the time).
The iPhone is not a device created to celebrate developer freedom - it is first and foremost a consumer device, and decisions related to it will always be about the end user first. This will no doubt piss off many developers who will gnash and scream that Apple aren;t doing what *they* want them to do, but ultimately, this will not change things all that much for the bulk of the developers on the platform.
Now what might be the resource use case improvement here? I'll start the speculation with this thought and leave it to others to fill in more.
No offence, but this does smack being the thin end of a typical wedge of rationalisation that ends up justifying and "explaining" Apple's behaviour in the absense of any explanation from them.
While I'm not accusing you (specifically) of being a fanboy necessarily, Apple's secretive nature generally benefits them when combined with their rather partisan fanbase. Say nothing concrete that can be seized upon, and let people speculate, rationalise and justify your marketing decisions.
It's up to Apple to explain- or not- the reasoning behind what they do; if the latter, that's their choice, but we're not obliged to give them the benefit of the doubt. Sorry, but I don't believe the reasons behind the decision were technical, and I'm not going to buy a third-party's speculation masquerading as explanation.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
To 100% certainty, no...
Certain enough for Apple to ban an app or ask to see the source? Sure.
For popular commercial stuff like MonoTouch, they'd just need to come up with some sort of fingerprint or signature. Presumably they're all going to have some boilerplate library code in there, MonoTouch.init_gc() or whatever...
For homebrew stuff, they can probably still look for stuff that clearly isn't written by a human. Not sure how much a name mangling scheme would get exposed in Objective-C, but that'd be a good place to start.
Can you construct some sort of rudimentary lathe?
Having one language, so long as it's turing-complete, shouldn't give you fewer methods to solve a problem.
Sure it can. Compare two Turing-complete languages, identical in every way except that one supports unsigned integers and the other doesn't. Right off the bat, one offers more ways to do some things than the other.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
You have been able to deep link into Flash for years. And honestly, if you think touchscreen phones are over glorified, I'm not sure why you're involving yourself in this debate at all.
It's like you brought a big swath of your lawn up in here, laid it down, and asked everyone to get off of it.
meep
Mac users had to settle for being locked out, shit on, and ignored for many, many years. Suddenly the servant is the master and everyone's whining about how Adobe isn't allowed to continue to foist their buggy plug in and dev tools on us anymore. Grow up. Compete. Make a decent HTML 5 animation editor that doesn't suck like all the other Mac software you've put out in the last 10 years.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
I trust you do all of your programming in BrainFuck right?
Face it, even if any Turing complete language can do what any other Turing complete language can do, sometimes there are write languages for the job, and sometimes there are wrong languages for the job.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Who buys extended warranties? They are a scam when it comes to rust-proofing your car, they are a scam when it comes to your computer.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]