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Will Adobe Sue Apple Over Flash?
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's iron-bound determination to keep Adobe Flash out of any iWhatever device is about to blow up in Apple's face. Sources close to Adobe tell me that Adobe will be suing Apple within a few weeks."
Adobe didn't play nice with Apple in the 1990's and about killed it. Instead they sucked up to Microsoft. Turn about is fair play, but there are still good technical reasons why Flash is not good for devices like iPad and iPhone. They are not personal computers. They are devices and Apple is trying to squeeze the most out of them.
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Do you know what a monopoly is? how can you possibly claim Apple has a monopoly in either one of those markets? most figures I've seen put them in the 15-20% market share for smartphones, and those numbers are probably high.
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It's very good, except that it's wrong. Apple did know about the iPhone packager, of course (there are approved apps in the AppStroe built with the prerelease versions of it, and Adobe has been bragging about it for a while) - and they did nothing to hint they would prevent it, up till the very last second.
(banning "interpreted code" does not count, the iPhone packager did not create interpreted code)
Actually, since Apple are pushing for H.264 video (which they part own the patents to AFAIK) in HTML5 you could say that they're offering a competing product.
which is totally what she said
really? how did you get flash working on your Android phone? I have a Moto Droid running v2.1 and there is no flash support. Adobe is working on an Android Flash app or something, but there is no firm release date for it yet.
The relationship between Adobe and Apple has been somewhat strained. Adobe for the most part made their name with Photoshop on Mac. Over the years they have slowly shifted their main focus to PC products instead and then going porting these products back to Mac. This is most evident with the Cocoa API Framework. Apple first released the APIs with OS X back in 2001. Up until CS5 was released on Monday, Adobe didn't use the API framework and instead relied on the Carbon Framework. That's 9 years to move frameworks. CS5 is also the first to be 64 bit as well. Apple might be a little tired of Adobe dragging its feet on development.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Feb 2010 Smartphone Market share
Well, not really.
"Some anonymous guy" is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and he's a regular writer for IT World.
And the anonymous submitter would appear to be one "smlynch" according to the URL to TFA. Sure, it's not much, but it's not exactly anonymous.
Sig matters not. Judge me by my sig, do you?
Rather than Adobe dragging their feet, Apple fucked them over when they released developer docs for Carbon 64 and then later cancelled the entire API without any explanation. The Mac Zealot idea that there was some sort of roadmap or plan to transition everyone to Cocoa is simply factually incorrect. Apple just spontaneously did it and without warning their major development shops (even internally).
And I don't see how developers wasting their time with platform churn rather than adding new features and improving the product helps anyone. The platform-purity argument is bunk - the programs really aren't any better for using Cocoa as far as anyone can tell.
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incorrect.
You don't need 100% of a market to have a monopoly.
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I think this goes a long way beyond html5 video.
The newest release of Flash can apparently generate iPhone compatible applications. Apple rewrote their developer terms that require you to write your iPhone apps to run directly on the platform using a spcified language (i.e. objective C, C, C++ or Javascript). Using a cross-compiler to develop an application is prohibited.
This would have been a big market for flash, Apple have closed it off for no apparent reason other than to spite Adobe.
Apple itself doesn't use hardware acceleration (except on the 9400M chipset, and even then only very recently) for things like H.264.
Flash on Windows doesn't use hardware acceleration either (10.1 will), and the performance is better than the OS X version.
All of the graphics components of OS X are documented and other third party vendors seem to have no problems.
On2 even had a decent flash player built into its own app (used to use it to test flash videos with simple player templates that the software would make for you if you gave it a source video - it was much better than the flash plugin for the browser!)
Perhaps Adobe should have started here: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/GS_GraphicsImaging/
just like everyone else who wants to build something that displays something on the screen. I'll give you another hint: "nothing aside from blessed quicktime components can actually use video acceleration" is bullshit. Have you even read the documentation?
You have full (and extremely well documented) access to the graphics abilities of OS X as a developer.
The complaints about "acceleration" are almost all related to the lack of hardware decoding of H.264 in OS X, which is limited to the Nvidia 9400M chipset only. Even "blessed" Quicktime doesn't use hardware decoding of H.264 on OS X (unless you have a Mac with a 9400M). Hopefully this will be added soon.
Apple made a hard decision to cut support for a legacy framework, with broad impact to many of its developers. This very trait is often lauded in comparisons to Microsoft, where many people would dearly love for terrible legacy frameworks and APIs to be deprecated (or even just 'nuked from orbit'). Moreover, Apple isn't obligated to do any work to make Adobe's life easier.
If you want to continue silly tit-for-tat analyses of such things, Adobe screwed Apple over a decade earlier by refusing to port anything to Cocoa -- sticking with Carbon in the first place. This Roughly Drafted article provides more of the historical color.