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A Peace Plan To End the Flash-On-iPhone Fight
GMGruman writes "As the pro- and anti-Flash camps have hardened their positions, the editors at InfoWorld have come up with a four-point peace plan that would allow Flash on the iPhone while addressing Apple's very real concerns over performance, stability, and security. Readers can vote and comment on the peace plan, which InfoWorld hopes will result in serious talks between Apple and Adobe."
Here:
1. Create a Flash video player plug-in.
2. Put the core Flash technologies into the standards bodies.
3. Create an iPhone-certified SWF exporter for Creative Suite.
4. Explore a Flash app certification process.
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I don't think anyone will be required to buy a pricy developers license - Apple doesn't require that for any of their development environments now, so I doubt they will require it in the future. So far, on OSX and iPhone/iPad, Apple have made their environments free to use and cheap to release for.
It's $99 a year. Also you are required to buy Mac OSX which seriously brings up the price.
If I want to develop for Linux, I can write the full code in Windows and compile it too. If I want to develop for Windows, I can write the full code in Linux and compile it too. What about Mac OSX?
The counterpart to Flash development in the iPhone world is AJAX and HTML5. That's free and you don't need to use the app store. It's called a Rich Internet Application (RIA) or a "web app". The so-called Flash replacement is a Javascript library that makes it easier to write web apps that look like native apps. That will actually help developers who don't want to pay fee or go through the app store. You pay $99 in order to develop native apps for the iPhone - that's different.
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It claims to support SWF1 and a lot of SWF2. Right now I believe we're on SWF9, so there's a long way to go, but it does show that the approach works.
Say Apple releases new API's you want to use in your app. Here's what you do as an Xcode coder:
1) Download the new Xcode with new API's
2) Modify your code to use new API's
3) Recompile
4) Submit to store
Here's what you do if you want to use new capabilities from your Flash app:
1) Wait for Adobe to download new XCode
2) Wait for Adobe to use new hooks in code and expose them to you in new functions.
3) Buy new version of Flash development.
4) Modify your code
5) Export as iPhone app
6) Submit to store
I would rather have to code in Objective-C than wait for and have to buy a new version of Adobe Flash, just to get the capabilities made available by Apple's Xcode.
Actually, you pay $99 to release native apps for the iPhone. You can sign up and download the dev environment for free. It's not immediately obvious, but I have it sitting here in my downloads folder after a bit of circular link-following on Apple's site.
The developer agreement does not make it illegal for someone to work on other projects. It doesn't even make it illegal for you to install Pascal apps on your iPhone. It does mean that Apple won't approve Pascal apps on the iPhone, and you won't get them into the app store. But you are being a bit hysterical to think that joining the developer program in any way affects what else you do.
The new agreement forbids using the SDK to compile programs that are not originally written in any of the approved languages:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
(emphasis mine). Of course, Apple cannot check what I do if I don't submit any apps to the AppStore, but I would definitely be in violation with the new SDK agreement if I first agreed to the new terms and then continued compiling and running Pascal programs on my iPod.
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I have a hard time imagining someone who has a workflow that includes large amounts of important content that pushes it out in Flash, and can't invest in taking that same content and migrating it to HTML5/CSS3.
Simple.
Those people pick up a book on HTML5/CSS3.
Actually, you don't. You can compile Apple's toolchain on any other platform you want. Their fork of GCC is open source (GPL), clang / LLVM is open source (BSDL), and even their linker is open source (APSL). There isn't much in the iPhone part of Apple's open source site, but the toolchain is. If you want to compile it for some other platform and use it for cross development, you can. They don't ship Linux binaries, but then Microsoft doesn't ship a Linux cross-compiler either, and you need to either use WINE to run theirs or use a third-party one.
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Frankly, HTML5, css, and javascript allow you to do everything flash does. They don't control the tools there. I don't know, as a web developer - I'm all for the death of flash and old browsers. If the iPhone and iPod become pervasive enough to say, make it more valuable to code in HTML5 over flash, then companies with limited budgets will use HTML5. If enough people use HTML5, older standards incompatible browsers will be less useful. Think of all those companies running IE6 for business apps. If Apple had some way of killing off these incompatible applications, Apple would be opening themselves to more customers... Or perhaps Apple just wants to hurt Adobe enough to buy them out.
I don't see why you couldn't develop an application using the XNA Framework under Mono. You can even test it on your Linux machine with Mono XNA
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Video on the iphone already plays with hardware acceleration. YouTube. UStream, Vimeo. Apple designed it this way in the very first iphone back in 2007.
You don't need Flash 10.1 for this. In fact it only underscores my point (in other posts) that depending on an interim format to implement and support new features gets in the way.
Pop quiz, hotshot.
Do you have to buy a Microsoft Developer licnese to wirte code for Windows Machines?
Nope
You pay for the license to use their tools.
DO you have to pay Microsoft to release software for Windows?
Nope
Do you have to submit your program for approval before you can sell your program?
Nope.