Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Stops Development For iPhone
adeelarshad82 writes "Adobe's principal product manager Mike Chambers announced that Adobe is no longer investing in iPhone-based Flash development. The move comes after Apple put out a new draft of its iPhone developer program license, which banned private APIs and required apps to be written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine. According to Chambers, Adobe will still provide the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5, but the company is not currently planning any additional investments in that feature."
Daring Fireball points out approvingly Apple's rebuttal to the claim that Flash is an open format, however convenient it might be for iPad owners. Related: The new app policy seems to be inconsistently enforced. Reader wilsonthecat writes "Novell have released a new press release in response to Apple's announcement that none-C/C++/Objective-C based iPhone application development breaks their SDK terms. The press release names several apps that have made it past app review process since the new Apple SDK agreement."
"Despite what their Facebook status says, we broke up with Apple first."
It would be very funny if Adobe, just for spite, decided to stop making it's high end graphic design products compatible with Apple hardware. And figured out a way to make them not work via virtualization on Apple hardware as well.
I know, I know, they are publicly traded & would never cut off that revenue stream.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Seeing one closed off, 'play by our rules or gtfo' company, whining about another closed off 'play by our rules or gtfo' company is golden.
They must be banished from the compound and no believer may ever speak with them again.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Adobe is instead focusing on other platforms, namely Android. Chambers said he will personally shift "all of my mobile focus" from the iPhone to Android, and that he has a particular interest in Android-based tablets.
Guess that means we'll be seeing more flash based porn apps?
This has nothing to do with the current and prospective feature set of the iPad, iPod Touch, or iPhone. It relates only to the features available to the developers on those systems. This article does not discuss Flash in a browser or embedded web content, but rather Flash as a development environment that can be compiled down to native iPhoneOS binaries. So it really only matters to developers of existing Flash games who want to port their content to the iPhone easily. Given the market share of the App Store in the mobile space, though, my guess is it won't put much of a dent in app availability, and thus not affect end-users at all.
E pluribus unum
It's a rival to Fair and Balanced C. In both languages, you give both sides (C, some half-assed SmallTalk implementation) equal time, regardless of which is actually any good.
Fair and Balanced C is the version that includes Geraldo Rivera's implementation of Python.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
What would it take to get Adobe to quit infecting all platforms with their overhyped junk? Yes, yes, people love Photoshop. Just imagine that app, though, rewritten with a modern GUI toolkit and brand new underpinnings so that it wasn't a steaming pile. Now realize that it'll never happen because Apple fanboys have nothing on Adobe advocates and Adobe has no reason to spend development money making it better instead of adding shiny new features. (BTW, I'm not a Gimp fan, either - it's fully possible to dislike both apps on their own demerits.)
While I'm not a huge fan of Jobs, I sincerely thank him for driving a stake into Flash's corrupted heart. Would that the rest of Adobe's hoggish wares die with it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
animated, audible, CPU-eating hellhole
HTML5 authoring tools will bring this to your iPhone.
by forcing people into HTML5,
This has nothing to do with HTML5. This is about Adobe compiling Flash to objective-C.
Before apple switched to Intel, they warned developers they ought to stick to the cocoa coding guidelines uber strictly. Those that apps that did were nearly just a recompile away from being native fat binaries for intel/ppc after switch.
Adobe took over 2 years to release native photoshop and acrobat readers. The only reason those apps even ran was because Apple had purchased the company Rosetta to make an emulator. If no emulator had existed then they would have lost photoshop!! Even then graphic arts folks were not thrilled to be having to retain their PPC computers just to run native.
You can see why apple would not want to have an adobe flash layer running apps on the iphone. Assuming adobe did not update the flash player for two years, apps would not even run on the platform switch. There might not be a suitable emulator that could run on a resource starved iphone.
Apple would lose a lot of apps. Consumers would be confused. And Developers would blame apple for the platform switch going so ugly.
Now is it reasonable to presume that Adobe is not using Xcode to develope their apps? yes. One might even speculate they are using adobe AIR or some other cross platform API since their apps run on many more platforms than xcode supports.
Why bet the farm on adobe's good will when they screwed apple over photoshop and Acrobat
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Next step? It's not like Adobe hasn't already been doing this for years. They canceled Framemaker for Mac despite it being a better seller on the Mac than PC. They killed Premiere but that was after Apple came out with FCP since Premiere on the Mac sucked so bad. Then putting out Lightroom after Apple came out with Aperture. Even Flash. They really haven't done anything with it on the Mac side since they got it from Macromedia. Development has been lagging on the Mac side (and even worse for Linux). Perhaps if Adobe had been paying attention to it and actually supporting it, Apple might not have decided they didn't want it so quickly.
For that matter, it's not like they have a real copy of Flash for any phone yet, let alone the iPhone. Even if Apple hadn't had prevented it, there's no real garantee it would be anything but vaporware yet. At best, there would be some Lite version that wouldn't do much and whose performance would lag behind even the Linux version of Flash. My suggestion to Adobe is that if they really want Flash as an iApp, then concentrate on the Android OS. Put out a really good version of Flash for that platform, show that it can work, and that it isn't going to be some half assed job, then maybe Apple will reconsider, especially if it becomes a selling point for the Droid.
Exactly.
People don't care about Flash, and they don't care about an open app store. The iPhone does what they want it to do.
I don't care that I had to mod my original X-Box so that I could run XBMC, watch DVDs without buying the remote, or backup my games to run off the harddrive. At the time of the purchase, I was aware of the features (and limitations) of what I was buying. I have an iPhone and don't want an Android. I use the web browser to look up things randomly, IMDB movies, listen to Pandora, etc. What am I missing out on? If I need anything else, I have a perfectly capable desktop and laptop.
I'm not trying to flame, can someone answer: What kind of apps do you use on the Android that aren't available on the iPhone, but are so important that you have to use them immediately, and can't wait until you're back on a desktop/laptop? (But of course if you can answer that question, then buy an Android, ignore the iPhone and move on)
When your enemies are fighting. Don't interrupt them.
Except it seems Apple won't be happy until they kill the notion of "general purpose computer" for the masses and each computing "device" sold to the public is a locked down single purpose appliance designed for the consumption of content, all preferably sold by Apple.
I as someone who makes a living from developing software and who generally loves tinkering with computers hate that vision and can not support Apple moving close to it.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I think Apple (rightly or wrongly) have decided their mission is to drag the tech world kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
...kicking and screaming into their dedicated storefront you mean.
This has nothing to do with whether the iPad runs on fusion and unicorn farts or coal fired steam engines. It's about making sure people can't develop any apps or consume any content that will compete with what you can buy in the App store.
All your points relate to a completely different issue than what this article is actually about (don't worry, it looks like 99% of the 'techies' posting to this article fail to understand what Adobe actually announced related to Flash and the iPhone).
In short: THIS IS NOT ABOUT FLASH IN THE BROWSER ON THE IPOD/IPHONE/IPAD.
Let me repeat: THIS IS NOT ABOUT FLASH IN THE BROWSER ON THE IPOD/IPHONE/IPAD.
Adobe released a feature that allows you to export an app created in Flash CS5 (not the Flash Player client) as a native iPhone app. This meant you could export an iPhone app that includes ZERO bits of Flash that could then be submitted to Apple's AppStore and appears like every other app.
What Apple said in the their license is, essentially, you must not use 3rd party tools to create native iPhone Apps. XCode and Objective-C are your options.
What Adobe said is that they will no longer work on the above feature for the Apple devices. But will work on it for other devices.
So if you want to create an app that targets the web, the desktop, Android, iPhone, etc. You will be able to target all these platforms with a single code base -- except the iPhone...that you will have to write separately in Objective-C as a completely different code base. Because of Apple's whims.
Note that, according to the license, this also applies to all other non-Apple tools that can be used to cross-compile to a native iPhone app.
Get a Macintosh.
I have a MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz, 2 GB of RAM. It's 2 years old, and doesn't support GPU help decoding video (it's a GeForce 8600M GT). Someone at my work was questioning why I think Flash is so evil, today I was able to show them. I watched three videos today. Let's compare the experiences.
Now not all YouTube videos are that bad, for some reason that particular video was just really bad. Many small videos like that will only use 30-50% of both cores. Even smaller videos will have occasional hiccups where it will drop 2 frames. 480p videos will usually use up a good chunk of my CPU (~80%), and 720p videos can drop frames when a lot changes in the scene (like a pan). If I change from Flash to HTML5 video (MPEG4), 720p stuff plays back no problem. OK Go's recent video of a Rube Goldberg machine? My Mac can't play it reliably in Flash at 480p without dropping frames when a lot of action is going on.
It's not just videos, although that's where I usually run into it. Flash sites with animation just suck down CPU, little games can really heat up my Mac. I think the problem is the way Flash displays things, but that's just a hunch.
If you know anyone with a Mac (the older the better), go play around with Flash content. It's almost impressive how poorly it performs. Faster and faster Macs help cover it up, but that's no excuse. I'm pretty sure that I could have played Flash content through Parallels at the same or lower CPU usage, but I don't have Parallels installed anymore to test with.
If Adobe spent any time optimizing Flash on OS X, people wouldn't hate it nearly as much. Apple would still hate it (Steve likes control), but people wouldn't have the "kill it now" attitude.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It's because Adobe really hasn't done much for Apple lately. I might be out of the loop because I use gimp for mac full time now, but as far as I know Adobe never actually ported Photoshop to become a cocoa app. This is another bad problem: no 64 bit for macs, only windows. And that's been the Mac user's cross to bear for a long time now, companies like Adobe (or Bungie) that used to focus on the mac platform have made the calculation that when one OS manufacturer owns 90% of the market (MS), even if all of the remaining people buy their products, it's still only 10% of the total base and more sales could be had by focusing on the monopoly OS. In the past Apple had to bend over and take it. Now they don't. As a guy who started using macs in 1997, all I have to say is: Revenge is sweet. I hate flash anyway, slow as molasses.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
From where I sit, html5 is the innovation and the future of the web here, flash is holding innovation up because it's being forced to do things it was never designed to do. Apple is pushing the world forward by releasing us fro relying on a plugin that relies on a single manufacturer, i.e., Adobe.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Your friends are poor researchers because the iPhone and iPod Touch have never supported Flash. That's why the iPad flap was always so funny to me. It could be summarized as "Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
You don't understand what just happened between Adobe and Apple, then.
Apple's said plenty of times that it won't support Flash as an interpreter/runtime on the iPhone. I think everybody understood that.
What happened here is that Adobe took them at their word, and did something totally different: they wrote a compiler which takes content written using CS5 and targets *Apple's* runtime. FLA file in, iPhone Binary out. Not SWF, iPhone Binary. Doesn't need the Flash Player to run. Apple wouldn't have had to do a damn thing to "support" these applications.
So Apple changed their license terms and banned apps from the store that were created by another toolchain to target Apple's runtime.
And, for good measure, they also banned apps that are made by targeting Apple's tool chain from another language. So that way, Adobe knows they can't decide to build a version of Flash that takes a FLA file and emits an XCode project that's ready to build.
Of course, that means you can't do something like write in Scheme that compiles to C, either. Or for that matter, generate any code, really. If you're going to target the iPhone, you'll write all your C, C++, and Objective C code by hand like a real man, buster, and you'll like it.
Tweet, tweet.
Everytime someone complains that Flash is terrible on Linux, I have to remind people that Flash is just terrible on every platform.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I understand exactly what happened; I just don't care.
And in turn, I don't care that you don't care. I do care, however, that you made a post that indicates and propogates misunderstanding about the matter.
"Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
Perhaps you should stop posting on the topic until you can bring yourself to care enough to make statements that are accurate.
And I still stand by my assertion that buying a iPhone for the explicit purpose of running Flash apps is a fundamentally bad decision.
We're not talking about Flash apps. We're talking about iPhone apps.
Tweet, tweet.
Ummm, third parties, cannot directly access the video hardware on Windows or Linux either, but apps running on them seem to be able to use the provided video APIs just fine.
Read the up on the problems VLC and others have on OSX. Yes the APIs are there, but they DON'T ACTUALLY WORK!
Flash, VLC and the rest don't need direct hardware access on OSX, just playback APIs that aren't crippled.