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Adobe Calls Out Apple With Ads In NY Times, WSJ
Hugh Pickens writes "Businessweek reports that Adobe has taken out newspaper advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times today and posted an open letter to call out the tablet-computer maker for stifling competition. 'We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs,' the letter states. 'No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.' The letter is part of a widening rift between Apple and Adobe. Two weeks ago, Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs wrote a 29-paragraph public missive panning Adobe's Flash as having 'major technical drawbacks.' US antitrust enforcers also may investigate Apple following a complaint from Adobe, people familiar with the matter said this month. Adobe has also launched a banner ad campaign to let you know that they love Apple. The two-piece banner ads are composed of a 720x90-pixel 'We [heart] Apple' design, followed by a 300x250-pixel medium rectangle that reads: 'What we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web.'"
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It done been brought!
Living With a Nerd
Be able to open massive security holes in any device or platform! - Adobe
Adobe: We Bitch and Moan until we Get Our Way(TM)
yet nobody is complaining about that. Maybe the expectations that an iPhone/iPad should run /everything/ are just a bit too high for a small device.
Fantastic how they're crying for "openness" a mere day after they announce Selective Output Control DRM in Flash.
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2010/05/adobes-new-flash-drm-comes-with-selective-output-control.ars
'nuff said
Your mind moves quicker than a nun's first curry. - A. Rimmer
I'm not going to pretend there aren't advantages to Apple in requiring people to use Apple's API to code on Apple's hardware (yeah, yeah, I know you bought it, I know it's *yours*, but you know what I mean). Of course there are. That doesn't invalidate the concerns above. I'm sure 'the Steve' sees it as a bonus.
Knowing people who work at Apple, they're a focussed bunch. They care passionately about making things easy to use, and frankly about making the very best (whatever) possible. There's very little of the jaded cynicism I've found in other companies over the years - they're more willing to "++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start." than anywhere else I've ever seen, and I (personally) can easily see the above being sufficient reason to abandon Flash as a platform if they think it's beyond saving.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
But they still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to rewrite their products (Flash isnt their only product) to stop using APIs from two deprecations ago. They apparently love Microsoft even more than Apple.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
No really, Adobe doesn't like Apple. How could they?
The reality is that Adobe feels like they are being shut out. Whether this is anti-competitive/monopolistic behavior by Apple is going to be decided by court cases.
The reality is that for all their support of open standards, Adobe Flash still requires a plugin. It's not implemented by a browser. Apple does not like 3rd party code so close to their own core software in mobile devices. This is mostly because Apple will be blamed if devices die after an hour of usage because a rogue flash app is causing massive power drain. It happens! Also, I think they have processors optimized for a specific type of video codec. It may be that video acceleration is not available for anything but h.264.
There's no way out of this. Apple will not accept flash on their devices, and that's the end of the story. I'm pretty certain the court cases won't go anywhere either. Adobe needs to cope with it.
How about a version of the flash player written in Javascript? *giggle*
Any company trotting out the cynical phrase "freedom is choice" is lying. Plain and simple.
This whole argument is pot and kettle to the extreme.
Adobe doesn't have any business telling Apple that they're acting too proprietary because they refuse to open up the Flash spec. Your device's participation in the Flashverse is dependent on whether Adobe thinks you're important enough to deserve a Flash plugin. Effectively they are holding the Web hostage.
Apple doesn't have any business telling Adobe that they're acting too proprietary when you have to pass Checkpoint Charlie to execute so much as a single line of native code on iPhone OS, and even then you can't use a third-party compiler anymore.
I respect that Adobe is trying to make a living, but Flash is probably the worst thing to happen to the Web since the early days of Java. It's slow, buggy, it crashes constantly, support is inconsistent, and its bread and butter (video embedding) has been eaten by a much better way of doing things (HTML5 + Theora/H.264).
I respect that Apple is concerned about feature-completeness in the APIs, but seriously, there are plenty of good programmers out there dying to use Java and Python to write iPhone apps. I'm not one of them, but I know it must feel really obnoxious to be denied a viable programming language.
I love you ... I just don't like the things you do... or what you say...
Translation:
I love f*cking you...
Unless, of course, you're using FreeBSD and friends..
Why doesn't Adobe just get really tough and drop all production of the Creative Suite for Macintosh? I bet that would get Steve's attention PDQ.
I'm so sorry that you won't be able to cross-compile ('cross contaminate' in Apple lingo) your app for Android and iPad/iPod/iPhone/iDontKnow. But that's OK because according to a recent news article Android is now a bigger market to shoot for anyway.
If they really want to make a stament just don't release Photoshop and their other apps for Mac. Sure this will cost them quite a bit of money but for a part it can hurt a lot of professional Mac users and lure them back to Windows (I don't like Windows either but I prefer it above crApple) or let them release Linux versions of their products :)
I'd have much more sympathy for Adobes cause, If they hadn't decided that the people who create annoying pop up advertisements should be able to access your computer and that you shouldn't be able to moderate their behavior.
Yeah, and we all know how committed Adobe is to user choice, which is exactly why in addition to ".swf" format I'm sure your Flash player plug-ins will start playing .ogg files and .mp4 files as well, because your customers deserve to be free to use your product to open whatever files they want, not just the file types you support... right?
If you don't think you'd be happy with an ipad without flash, don't buy one. Consumers don't give a shit as long as it works for a year after they've bought it. After a year, there's the next Apple thing to buy.
Dear Adobe:
I recently read your open letter to Apple and let me just say that I cannot agree more. I particularly liked this bit:
"We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs. No company -- no matter how big or how creative -- should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web."
Since my platform of choice is [64 bit Linux, Solaris, Irix, HPUX, any of the Various BSDs...] I cannot wait for your forthcoming (very soon I expect) release of Flash for this platform! I realize that my platform of choice is not the most popular one out there, but your message gives me hope! Given your support of openness, and in full understanding that my platform is rather obscure, perhaps you could simply release most of the slient code as open source and allow me to port it myself. That would be even better.
Thanks
Users of various platforms that Adobe does not support.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
...and someone's finally taken notice of Apple's anticompetitive actions? Will wonders ever cease?
The iPhone is already more than capable of running Flash without violating any of Apple's rules, as seen with the Gordon project. If a couple of people can get a basic Flash interpreter working in their spare time, surely Adobe can put some man-hours towards a full implementation.
There is no question that Apple is making it difficult for Adobe, but the truth is that Adobe is not serious about Flash. They want a free ride with their existing products, but have no intention of doing whatever it takes to bring Flash to devices that require a little extra work. It is easier to go crying to the media and make another company look bad for Adobe's own shortcomings.
I do not like Apple's restrictions as much as the next guy, but Adobe needs to get over it. Either bring Flash to the iPhone through the allowable channels, or make Flash so compelling on other devices that nobody will consider purchasing an iPhone in the future.
keep sucking that open source dicks, homos.
I find it very disheartening that both companies are going to great lengths to show just how "OPEN" they are, when neither of them are even close to being "open" or really staunch supporters of all things "open." Both companies have jockeyed, in open and/or behind closed doors, to make standards their bi*ches and now they complain because their "industry standards" are being threatened.
This in turn has caused people to complain loudly about "freedom!!!" I want my freedom? I ask, freedom from what? You're now encountering what Stallman et al have been talking about for ages! You're only free as far as a company's whims says you are... Ohh, now I'm supposed to feel sad for those that hooked their toolset to Adobe? or to Apple for that matter? Why not focus on developing truly standards compliant applications with Open tools and let the companies come to us for a change rather than us bowing to them for the next release? We are all masters of our own domains, now "buck up" and act like it.
Problem is that Flash crashes constantly on the OSX platform. I get a flash crash on random websites just for banner adds on my mac. All Adobe has to do to get their product on the Iphone/ipad platform is make it so it actually works on said platform. As it stands simple flash programs run much slower on the OSX platform and crash much more often. Fix it Adobe, then complain.
Terrible analogy. Adobe may not help you, but they certainly won't do anything to stop you. Very different to what Apple wants to do.
Nobody expects their apple apps to run on a pc or their apple to run the pc games or office products. I think consumers knowingly make a choice when they choose a platform. And in the specific case of Apple, they are giving up some user choice for the perceived gain in the quality of the experience. I don't agree with the Adobe stance that openness is every damn executable should run on every damn platform.
Opera on the Wii implements it, I believe Flash is also built in, in some of the latest Chrome builds now.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I don't think this is the type of freedom our founding father's had in mind when they wrote the Bill of Rights. I think the type of freedom they had in mind would be Apple having the freedom to not support Flash on their device and consumers having the freedom to not buy an Apple product if this design decision is not to their liking. It's not like Apple is locking out Adobe to push their own proprietary standard, there is no anti-trust issue here.
Adobe is the next Sun. They're going to keep faltering and faltering until they're bought out by some giant. Open source and open standards are going to kill them. Eventually Gimp will work well enough to replace Photoshop, Flash will be dead, an open source WYSIWYG will replace InDesign/Dreamweaver, and this trend will continue with all their products. I think the folks at Adobe realize the impact that open source will have. They know that keeping the web running on Flash is their only hope to survive as a company.
Adobe is like if Microsoft only had Office and IE. Look at what OpenOffice, Firefox, Chrome, and Google Docs are doing. Software as a product is a failing business model, software as a service is the future. IBM and Google know this, that's why they're so ahead of the curve.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Both of the companies can try and have their way, but what I would remind people of is that what the users want/need should be the important thing. It seems to me like both of these companies don't even want to believe that maybe their product(s) aren't what people actually want/need.
So get up offa that keyboard, come open the door and let me in. And go make me a sandwich while I use your computer to develop in Flash. You have Mountain Dew and Cheetos, right? No? You bastard! Stop infringing on my freedom to eat and drink what I want and go get me some!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Sorry, but Adobe's reaction to this situation is making one thing absolutely crystal clear - they are shitting their pants right now. They are terrified. They know their major cash cow is in major trouble and they are going to fight with every trick in the book to avoid the inevitable. Because, that is what it is - inevitable. Flash is becoming old news and nothing Adobe can do is going to change that fact. Their tantrum-throwing flailing isn't going to change things. HTML5 is going to push Flash to the side. It may not stick in the long term (I think it will but I won't argue that fact because the industry is always changing) but it will certainly provide the catalyst for people to move on to something else.
...as I am of Adobe.
Adobe has always screwed the foremost free open source community. Flash is not and has not been open format.
If they want to change their act, open the specs so that others can actually implement it and collaborate with Apple and others to fix possible problems.
As it stands, Flash is an annoying legacy, like IE6, that is painfully dragged around until the replacements achieve necessary momentum..
Well, they were in the process of creating a actionscript vm for firefox with the Mozilla foundation if I remember correctly.
Android is now a bigger market to shoot for anyway.
Android is a bigger market, I suppose, but which Android is the bigger market within the bigger market? Fragmentation of the versions and the not so backwards / forwards compatibility is making it hard to target.
Why bother
Why not push for ISO certification for Flash? It worked with the PDF.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Great! Now if they would be kind enough to adjust the European prices for their products so that they are not 2 times more expensive than in the US.
Observe:
http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Creative-Suite-Master-Collection/dp/B003B328TE/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1273768517&sr=1-3 - $2,450.99
http://www.amazon.de/Adobe-Creative-Master-Collection-deutsch/dp/B003FSSL3M/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1273768468&sr=1-5 - EUR 3,688.00 = $4,683.39
And thanks to some european laws that Adobe strongly supports and enforces (with the help of BSA) it is illegal for an european company to use software bought in the US.
Yay for open markets.
This is a battle between purveyors of closed devices that exert outrageous amounts of control over what users can do with their devices, and purveyors of bug riddled crash prone propretary garbage who are misusing the word "open" as cover for a self-serving argument.
Wouldn't it be nice if they both lost, somehow?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Android may be a bigger market, but the iPhone I'm targeting with my app resides in a deeper pocket, my friend.
Pfft! My COBOL.Net based app for the iPad contraption will pwn your feeble efforts! I have my COBOL to Ada to Lisp to LabView to FORTRAN to VHDL to C to Objective C/Cocoa workflow all ready to start chugging away. Throw the switch, Igor!
Who you calling an Anonymous Coward SD?
You bring up an interesting point. Why hasn't Adobe baked Flash into WebKit? Even if Apple chooses to ignore the fork for Safari, there are hundreds of other browsers that use the same codebase, including Chrome and the Android browser that would benefit from the contribution.
What if Apple were to develop their own flash plugin? Assuming that the spec is truly open (I'm not sure since I haven't read it) - then the shoe would be on the other foot - Apple could slow the adoption of new Flash features implemented by Adobe by not updating the Flash plugin to work with them. I wonder then what Adobe's argument would be?
'We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs,'
So that is why they make all of their software Linux compatible....
This couldn't be better timing! I've been working on a killer app using Authorware for the last 5 years in my secluded dungeon. I'm a bit out of touch with what's going on on the internet because I've been really busy not paying attention, is online multimedia still dominated by Java Applets, VRML, and Director/Lingo?
Anyway, the product is now ready to be sold to the world for lots of money. I would love your support in porting to iPad and iPod. Support freedom to use whatever I want! Unlike Apple not owning Flash, this is your product so it should be a breeze.
Wait, no?
http://www.newtrafficserver.com try this one
Too often corporations pull out the "freedom" word when it suits them and then ignore it all other times. I think the word they really want is "control". For instance, what about Dmitry Sklyarov's freedom to publish security research at a conference? Adobe didn't seem to think much about freedom at that time.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
...what's stopping Apple from implementing their own secure Flash runtime?
I believe the real reason for Flash missing on the iPhone and Ipad is the simple fact that a lot of apps that Apple is currently getting a pretty penny for through the app store could be implemented as quite simple flash apps, free for all to use. It's a business decision, plain and simple.
The real question is, will coming generations embrace technology with limits like these, or will people eventually realize the value of true openness? Given that people in general seem content with the limits on things like DVDs and Blu-Rays I'm leaning towards the likely outcome being a less free computing environment for the masses, as much as I hate to say it.
.: Max Romantschuk
I think Adobe releasing Linux versions of their software (Photoshop, etc.) would be very beneficial since there are far more Linux users now. This would make Apple quite nervous.
I hate Apple for their anti-consumer politics and demeaning advertising. I hate Adobe because their software is bloated, buggy, and insecure. Now that you know I'm not partial to either company, why should Apple be able to block Adobe's media platform out of their hardware? Isn't this just like Microsoft bundling IE with Windows, leaving other browsers at a huge disadvantage? Isn't this worse because Adobe isn't even getting a chance to gain iPad customers? This is also companies deciding how their customers use their product, and that is bad. It may not be illegal, but it is very bad and I really wish this community would get past their fanboi-ism and on to the actual topic.
If Apple gets away with this then they will set a sort of precedence. It could start a trend where any hardware company could block a software company from their product, or the other way around, or with any combination of industries/products. Capitalism is great and all *cough* but the quest for a higher bottom line seems to remove all morals and justice from business and Apple's behavior represents just one of many slippery slopes.
If you really <3 Apple, how about working on flash for OS X first? If I can bog down a 2core machine with 4GB of RAM with 1 flash game and 1 Youtube video open, I don't even want to think about how flash will run on the iPhone.
Apple has the hooks for hardware acceleration. You could even do something with GrandCentral if you wanted.
Adobe has bitten Apple numerous times in the past (It's the reason Final Cut Pro exists). Extend the olive branch and show that you're even capable of making flash run decent on the Mac, then the iPhone may follow.
According to that article, Android, on all devices, is barely beating out iPhone OS on one device. iPhone OS is sold on three distinct devices (iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad), of which the latter two were not included in the numbers. Android has a long way to go.
Regardless of the availability of flash, there will almost certainly always be some people who don't have it on their device, perhaps by choice. As well there as those who haven't run the updates in while. These and other factors mean that one can never guarantee the capabilities of those visiting a web-site. Therefore, regardless of who you consider to be on the moral high ground, i suggest that it is the responsibility of any web developer to ensure as far as is reasonably possible that their site is equally functional for visitors with and without flash enabled.
err... I mean Release the Fanbooooois!
Let's just summarize their collective output: Apple is right because! Adobe doesn't deserve a chance to produce anything for the iPhone/iPad because we've SEEEEEEEN their products crash before and Apple never ships any products that crash. Apple users can't be trusted to avoid Adobe apps because they aren't interested in having a choice, they just want to be told what to use.
Adobe should give Apple the finger and cancel all support for the Mac platform. Watch the relevance of Macs in the workplace drop from 2% to 0%.
Oh yeah? So when is Photoshop for Linux coming?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Android may be a bigger market, but the iPhone I'm targeting with my app resides in the deeper pockets of people demonstrably more easily parted with their money for less reward, my friend.
FTFY
You know, the one Adobe promised would be free so that Apple could make the operating system named Rhapsody?
http://www.amazon.com/Rhapsody-Developers-Guide-Jesse-Feiler/dp/0122513347/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273769560&sr=1-4
I want to be able to program fill and stroke effects and have them show up on-screen like I used to be able to do w/ Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube.
Apple already caved in on programming environments to Adobe / Microsoft once, and we got Carbon (eventually) having to wait _years_ longer --- and then we had to re-create all of the functionality which was ``just working'' in NeXTstep.
If people want to run Flash on Tablet devices then they should choose to purchase things which run Flash, like the Axiotron ModBook:
http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook
or the HP Slate...
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
From TFA:
Flash runs on more than 800 million mobile phones, manufactured by all the top 20 handset makers except Apple.
As far as I know, Flash runs on zero million phones right now. FlashLite runs on a few, but certainly not 800 million.
You said it brother. These companies are practicing double-speak.
It'll only be open when they release their client source code as open source, as someone else mentioned. That'll be the day!!
(... that pigs fly...)
'We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs.'
I've used a lot of different applications in my life, and one of my favorites of all time (of ALL TIME) is the combination of Photoshop and ImageReady.
I understand your avowed intent, as voiced in your wish, is that a person just like me should be able to freely access these applications, regardless of what monetary device suits my needs.
In my personal case, an IOU that is to be paid by my progeny in 100 years time suits my needs perfectly. The mere fact that I elected to have a vasectomy and HAVE no progeny that I know of is incidental: there is still the possibility that I have offspring without my current knowledge.
I will take the liberty of ordering the software from your website, and understand the monetary transaction (as stipulated in your very public corporate position) is merely a formality, and this money will be returned to me forthwith.
Yours, Jackpot777.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
If they really want to make a stament just don't release Photoshop and their other apps for Mac. Sure this will cost them quite a bit of money but for a part it can hurt a lot of professional Mac users and lure them back to Windows...
So if you were CEO of Adobe would you risk your job by losing big on Adobe CS sales as many, many Mac users don't bother upgrading for that version? Remember Macs are about 50% of your sales by most estimates. And given that Adobe may well have monopoly influence on the professional photo editor market, (Apple does not on the smartphone or smartphone app markets) they could well be opening themselves up to a criminal antitrust suit. A good way to keep them from abusing the Photoshop market share would be to spin it off into a separate company. Assuming you escaped on the antitrust front, what would Apple's reaction be? Do you think Apple would come out with an Apple branded competitor to CS? They've done it before in response to lack of up to date OS X versions of apps. As CEO, would you really think this is a reasonable risk in order to try to bolster your Flash lock-in? Last time they did so, they took half Adobe's market share while forcing Adobe to slash the prices of some of their expensive video software.
...or let them release Linux versions of their products...
That would, of course, not be a problem for Apple at all. Anything that hinders the Windows lock-in brings Apple benefit because in the OS space they are winning not on lock-in but competing on features.
If Adobe Flash (which Adobe did not even develop BTW) were an really usable product, e.g. open source, able to be enhanced by the end-user, GREEN(!) and secure they would have a case to stand on (in critiquing Apple).
But Apple has a very good point with respect to their two main products -- the iPhone and the iPad. These are *battery* based devices and power consumption is a major concern. Right now I've got a "single process" [1] chrome session with the libflashplayer.so sub-process running and playing *NOTHING* the Flash Process is sucking down 25+% of my CPU (Pentium IV Prescott) [2]. This isn't just chrome, one sees the same behavior in Firefox its just more difficult to see because it runs as a single process.
GREEN programs take steps to minimize their CPU consumption, recognize when they are doing nothing and adapt, allow the O.S. to go into various power saving modes (ACPI, P4-clockmod adjustments, suspend to ram, etc.) and as far as I can tell Flash is designed so as to prevent that. If one strace's the chrome flash plugin process one discovers that in 10 seconds it issues 56,000 system calls -- 53,000 (95%) of them are useless gettimeofday() calls. Maybe Flash hoping that someone has requested that it play something... Seems like Adobe doesn't know what a "poll()" call is useful for.
So I'll do my best to avoid Flash entirely on the basis of its CPU use and CO2 emissions footprint and not even bother to open the potential security problems can-o-worms.
1. A "single process" chrome session is more often a 4-5 process session (given extensions, plugins, etc.) but it is far better (from a memory use standpoint) than the typical 35-process sessions one gets under Linux once one has exceeded the Google/Chrome "imposed" process limit.
2. Fortunately one can either "kill -s STOP" or entirely kill the libflashplayer.so plugin and chrome will keep right on functioning (with the possible informational messages in certain tabs/windows that there was a problem with Flash. Often times it isn't even clear that those tabs/windows were using Flash.
"Openness" in a platform (e.g. Flash vs. HTML5 vs. iPhone native apps) isn't necessarily connected to "openness" in the works of authorship displayed on that platform (e.g. major label video vs. Vimeo). The Flash platform includes stronger digital restrictions management in order to attract authors who demand DRM, but it's not mandatory.
In addition to being a bigger market sales-wise of phones with Android on them, the Android application market is much less saturated than Apple's, for now at least, which I believe is a good thing for aspiring developers.
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
+10 for awesomeness! (I've actually developed in Authorware, once.)
Yup.
Plus they choose to ignore.. iPhone sales have doubled in the past year.
Over 1 million ipads sold in the past 45 days.
The apple haters simply plug their ears and scream.... LA..LA...LA...LA.... I CANT HEAR YOU!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Saying "I love you" while getting kicked in the shins shows desperation on Adobe's part. They can see their world crumbling.
Adobe, just fix the problems with Acrobat Reader and Flash. I'm tired of hearing the whining, just solve the problem and this could all go away. Apple would change their mind if the technical reasons weren't there (although there may still need to be some apologies and releases of 64-bit Adobe products for OS X to help fix things).
Here, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock are simply dishonest.
One playing field is the open web which Apple is clearly and strongly fostering with it's development of WebKit as a leading standards supporting rendering engine now seen in use by all major mobile operating systems save Microsoft's. Apple is clearly supporting web standards which actually do run on any device you choose. Adobe on the other hand is clearly digging a Flash pit wherein everything remains the same. It's been talk talk talk about a version of mobile flash. I'm glad web standards are stepping up to the plate and being moved forward by Adobe's inability to deliver.
The other field is in regard to native applications. This is a very different war then claiming Apple is attempting to "undermine this next chapter of the web. I find myself strongly agreeing with Apple on one hand — I have used platforms held hostage by companies other than the original vendor and have seen the lack of progress ceding control, the control Apple is enforcing with section 3.1.1 and like Steve Jobs agree that John Gruber really nails it in his post which walks a line of rationality not seen in most corners of our daily lives. On the other hand I find some agreement with another premise – that a developer should be able to deliver a product in any
You can't publish such a weighty document full of error, sign it, post it with your chuckling portraits and believe you've won the day. This is desperate.
Just another example to prove that Apple fanboys are CRYBABIES!
Unhappy that the iPad doesnt support Flash? Is it really THAT important to you?
Then don't buy it. Simple market economics.
The market has further addressed this "deficiency" because I remember reading somewhere that a group of folks is developing an open-source version of the iPad using open hardware.
And furthermore, Apple is right for a change: flash is terribly slow and HTML5 is a very cool technology that largely supplants it.
So, screw Apple AND Adobe. And their respective fans of course, both of whom are stupid crybabies.
Get with the times people!
From the the founders" open letter:
So sparking an FTC investigation is competing? How about answering Job's challenge by demonstrating Flash running -and running well, while not making the battery cry- on a mobile device, any mobile device?
This response is really kind of sad in my opinion. The best way to respond to hurtful criticism is to prove the critics wrong, and until they cn do that, then this massive ad campaign is just a colossal waste of money.
Apple is only trying to "stop" you when you use their devices. They aren't trying to stop me if I'm using Firefox or Chrome or whatever on some other OS (or even on OS X).
This may be a flawed analogy, but wouldn't it be akin to a company releasing a car that only ran on diesel? That impedes all the companies that sell only "normal" gasoline. They're stifling competition! If you want to use "normal" gasoline, buy a car that runs on that. If diesel usurps gasoline as the standard fuel of choice, maybe it's because it's better.
Microsoft!
I find it pretty interesting that most people on Slashdot will actually think this is a good thing now. Oh, how quickly we forget.
But honestly I think it wouldn't be so bad. I like windows 7... on my iMac ...
Slashdotters would be having a complete shit fit.
Apple using CS designers will NEVER go to Windows if adobe abandons Apple. NO WAY IN HELL. See Quark 5.0 released to OSX's classic mode for an example.
Ya, I know when I buy a new game for PC, I tend to blame dell if the gameplay sucks.
Not that you sound like a fanboi repeating the same tired excuses or anything. Claiming you think it sucks totally sounds objective though, good thinking!
The analogy was about two closed source vendors, a history of technologies both open and closed being deprecated due to irrelevance, and marketing departments lying through their teeth for market share in a world more open-source every day. When the iPad becomes synonymous with VRML, will anyone have really cared?
I would think because Adobe doesn't want thousands of people pointing and laughing at their source code. Not to mention all the refactoring they'd need to perform to get around serious issues that remain undiscovered in its closed source form.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
I don't know why anyone feels the need to defend either of them. My initial inclination is that Apple has a point: If Adobe has shown their technology is deficient or compared to another, Apple should be free to choose the other. And to that point, Flash has never worked right on my phone nor has it really worked right on Linux x64. Its all about bringing the "future of the web" to the hot platform but everyone else gets left overs. But I also see that Apple is arbitrary and draconian with their platforms as well. Their technology servers to better Apple.
There are no angels in this argument, only devils we should scowl at more than the other. I scowl less at Apple at this case but they adopt this stance not to help the users but to help themselves. HTML 5 will work on Windows, Linux 64, Mac, iPad and a bunch of other platforms I haven't considered yet. Unless Adobe steps up their quality and does a turn around in the stability and performance on Flash then they aren't the future of the web but a problem many will create technology to solve.
I've seen this movie before. Except that it was Microsoft using DRM to try to control all and sundry. Actually they still are. The only exception was (is) that no one was calling them on it. Perhaps we will actually get some kind of open standard on the net (and on our technology) that everyone has 100% access to, and then we will be able to compare products. As it is now though, the 'net and all of computer-land in general is still in the wild wild west stage of development.
then they would buy a laptop instead of an iPad.
I don't think it matters very much. There are certain apps that are great to have (say, a mapping application). Those come with the phone, or are made available for any 'significant' platform by the entity providing the data or service.
Then there is a tier of apps that are 'gee-whiz', high end games, task specific apps, but not stuff that tons of people are going to pay much more than $10 for.
After that, it is only going to get harder to be $5 better (or $1 better) than the free equivalent to your app.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Sometimes the truth hurts, Adobe.
R.Mo
Bail out Adobe now, write your senators, frack, just call up Obama and get a new bailout going.
-- "98% of enterprises rely upon Flash Player" -- http://www.adobe.com/choice/flash.html
If Apple is allowed to "undermine this next chapter of the web" then 98% of enterprises WILL FAIL!
(ahem, Apple is doing a hella lot more to support the NEXT chapter of the web, rather than hold it in the current chapter of the web ... this argument is about native applications on the iPhone OS, NOT THE WEB!!!)
According to that article, Android, on all devices, is barely beating out iPhone OS on one device. iPhone OS is sold on three distinct devices (iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad), of which the latter two were not included in the numbers. Android has a long way to go.
Actually, the study involved smartphone market share in the US. The iPod touch and iPad are not smart phones, which explains why they weren't included. As far as Android having a long time to go, quadrupling market share in only 6 months is a damn long way it's already come. =)
They're both fulla bullpuckey and want more marketshare than they deserve.
... If that statement were applied to your desktop you'd be seeing red and you know it. Let's change it a little:
"Microsoft is only trying to 'stop' you when you use their OS. They aren't trying to stop you from using Firefox or Chrome or whatever on some other OS"...
If the above were the case instead of "limited" device like an ipad or iphone, far more people would have an issue with it.
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
From TFA: "No company -- no matter how big or how creative -- should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web," they wrote.
So Adobe thinks people should be able to watch video without being forced to use Flash.
So Do I.
Now I wonder what all the fuss is about.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Last time this happened, when they dropped Adobe Premiere, Apple bought Final Cut Pro and turned it into a good replacement with version 3 vs Premiere 6 and with Final Cut Pro 4 blew Premiere out of the water for a good number of years. Even though Premiere is back on Mac, I don't know anyone in the industry that uses it on Mac. They all still use FCP.
My guess would be Apple's response would be to fork or support programs like GIMP and Inkscape and throw developers at them and overhaul their UI's to Apple's standards. What better way to spite Adobe than create free tools to replace their cash cow. Adobe already bought out and killed the only competition in professional web & graphics tools (Macromedia).
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I'm curious how Adobe can claim "consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content" just after they implemented support for Selective Output Control in their proprietary DRM.
I couldn't view every page in every browser on every device before the iPhone or iPad, so how am I limited?
This isn't about freedom, it's about a market choice. People have bought the iPhone and iPad in droves and have said, more or less, that the devices are compelling enough to buy even without Flash support.
Apple doesn't have anywhere close to a monopoly in the mobile device space, so I don't understand the problem.
Someone enlighten me please.
I'm with you on that, I don't like Apple or their products for the most part, but I'm all for them limiting flash if they want to on their phones. I know it pisses a lot of people off but your absolutly right on with your analogy. They aren't being anti-competetive at all even though people seem to want to believe that. If I had the mod points +1 to you. People these days seem to believe that whatever they want is what should happen, they don't get that just cause they want it doesn't mean companies have to give it to you. Should they? depends on how big the market is, but they don't HAVE to.
letting an idiot know they are an idiot is not a game... it's a responsibility. - by Kristopeit, M. D. (1892582)
"Android may be a bigger market, but the iPhone I'm targeting with my app resides in a deeper pocket, my friend."
O RLY? What exactly do you mean by a "deeper pocket"? There are certainly reports showing that Android users buy less apps, but app developers keep using a variety of excuses to explain why they don't port/create their apps for Android. So which apps is it that the Android users are supposed to be buying? Personally i'd snap up the Final Fantasy games or the Colbert "the Word" app if they ever made their way to Android. Or Plants vs Zombies, and probably lots of other cool apps that i'm not even aware of yet.
Of course just to make it even more of a vicious circle, those reports now provide the perfect self-reinforcing excuse to continue not making/porting apps for Android.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Ad hoc is limited to 100 people per dev license.
Because then the entire Flash Player would have to be open source. If it was, then we wouldn't be having this argument, because then Apple would be able to tune the open source Flash Player to their devices, and get its performance up to par with their expectations.
That will really make me learn to love flash. Go ahead and remind the people you're trying to convince to like flash that that's what all the annoying ads are made of.
Flash Player already lets .swf files play .mp4 video; that's how YouTube works now. Its biggest advantage over HTML5 is that Flash comes with better libraries.
I'm not sure what iPhone sales have to do with how many iPod Touches and iPads are out there, especially given that iPod Touches now outsell the iPhone. And outselling during one quarter doesn't make a bigger market, especially when there were many more iPhones than Androids sold before that period that are still in use. Perhaps you're confusing the smartphone market with the app market? Few, if any, app devs are actually selling phones.
Where is my working Open Source Flash player Adobe?
The spec for everything but a couple deprecated video codecs has been out for two years; go write a player or pay to have one developed.
Adobe does not make that much money on Flash. Adobe makes money on selling 3-digit creativity software
...like Flash CS#.
I remember back during the megahertz wars how Adobe came out telling its customers that, based on benchmarks, they could no longer recommend Apple products. (This was back in early 2003)
Of course, that was when Adobe was pretty much the killer app that kept Apple breathing. If Apple lost Adobe during late OS9/early OS X, they lost everything. Furthermore, if the G5 flopped (which has been argued both ways), Apple would have to do something drastic. I believe the move to Intel is their response, and Adobe was very likely the catalyst.
So Steve Jobs, having a good memory and being somewhat egotistical, seems to me to be getting some revenge here by taking on one of Adobe's flagship product, now that Apple doesn't need Adobe anymore. It's hard to say that Adobe's creative suite is the bedrock of Apple profits these days, so there's not much to lose from his perspective.
Assuming that flash becomes available for iPad. Assuming that the application has a security hole (or more)
It's still up to the user to install/enable it (or should be). I think that negates security (and crashing) issues on it's own. Why can't Apple allow flash on the iPad, and simply disclaim it:
"Apple doesn't have the time or resources or interest to debug/quality test this software. We leave that to Adobe. Install at your own risk"
I've seen plenty of similar disclaimers on plenty of other products.
If Apple did this, then those who agree with Apples current stance can simply not have flash. Those who want flash and are willing to deal with the possible issues (assuming any exist which, lets face it, is likely) can take their own risks.
It's about having the option, not about fabricated nanny-like handholding behavour of Apple that most think (and may very well be) a mask for more selfish, antitrust inducing motivations.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
If I want to write an app in Flash for my Apple computer - isn't that my choice? That's all Adobe is saying.
I'm not an Apple lover, or an Apple hater. I am a Microsoft basher, though.
But, my question is - what does Apple sell, and what does Microsoft sell, exactly?
Apple seems to sell several hardware products, along with the software necessary to operate them.
Microsoft offers nothing but software, really. Their few hardware offerings are only small parts of their overall sales, right?
To me, there is one heckuva difference. Up to a point, at least, Apple should have the right to say what is going to run on the hardware that they support with guarantees that the hardware is going to work. Only up to a point - jailbroken Apple devices were jailbroken for a reason. And, those jailbroken devices are no longer under warranty, of course.
I hate it when people compare Apple with Microsoft, trying to draw a conclusion that monopoly laws should apply to Apple for the same reasons that Microsoft was/is/will be in trouble with various courts around the world.
Maybe, just maybe, Apple is guilty of some obscure unfair competition laws, but they are NOT a monopoly, unless and until they capture significantly more than 50% of the market for telephones, or computers, or some other device. Then, we can start quibbling over finer points of law than "They have a huge market share in some specific brand/type/style of device".
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
As soon as Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe get all of their development efforts stymied by legal actions and endless appeals, the younger generation will look out on the future and ask this question: Do I develop my own tools with open platforms, like Facebook and Google, or tie myself to one of these idiot vendors and hope my platform isn't sued out of existence?
I say, bring the DRM on. I hope they come up with a way to end piracy. I hope every single copy of iWork and CS suite and Microsoft product suddenly carries a full retail price, with inescapable and crippling DRM protected by the full force of the law. They will very quickly discover that they have only bought enough rope to hang themselves with.
That's why they make some noise every once in a while, but don't dare fully implement anything crack proof. Businesses wouldn't tolerate the downtime, and the kids who download the stuff for free would find an open source alternative and learn to use those tools instead.
The writing is on the wall. The only thing Apple and Microsoft are trying to do is hijack multimedia on the web by forcing their standards (or standards that they have some control over) down our throats. Remember when most streaming was done in the Windows Media formats? How about having to install a crippleware version of Quicktime just to play a video from a friend?
I for one am glad that Adobe provides flash equally for Linux, even though some video drivers are shit and can't even play it properly. (hello netbooks!)
If you are in the business of making operating systems, you have no business having control of the way content is delivered over the web.
Tell that to Microsoft, who wanted to give you a browser built into their operating system. They weren't even preventing you from doing something, just giving you some extra functionality built-in. Yet I seem to recall the DOJ and European Unions had some issues with that.
You are right: those of us who aren't mad at Apple for what they are doing likely would be mad if they did the exact same thing on the desktop. But that's because the desktop is a general purpose computer and the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch aren't. I would far more upset losing the use of my special-purpose computing appliance as a phone (guess which I have) due to poorly written third party apps than I am with Apple restricting those apps. (And yes, I'm also an iPhone developer.) I accept that the desktop may crash due to flawed third party software; it's a price I pay for flexibility.
In other words, where I think we differ is that I do not see a need to make every device that is capable of computing into a general purpose device.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
So, what's your point? If the contraption is working well, i.e. it does what's supposed to be doing while not killing the battery, then it really doesn't matter if it was written in Cobol.NET or you wrote the machine code directly because you dreamed of it last night.
Apps should be judged by their actual performance, not the tools used to generate them. We, as developers, of all people, should be able to comprehend that. Does anyone care if your app was compiled using gcc or Intel's compiler? That's C or Python or Delphi?
They are just being assholes to developers and to third party companies. If all companies were like that, there would be very less variety and the whole ecosystem would suffer.
Note: It's not illegal to be an asshole, but you can still get publicly called out for it, like Adobe and some posters here are doing.
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Listen, go back a few more articles about how the US GOVERNMENT can't run Linux on PS3's anymore, and you'll hear Slashdotter's saying "Well, stupid Air Force, they shouldn't be trying to use a game console as a computer", and "Sony can control their game-box how they please".
Now it's Apple being just like Sony, and suddenly the tables have turned to "how dare they!"
Make up your mind Slashdotters. Which way is it?
Are Apple and Sony EVIL? Yes.
Are they both going to get their way? Yes.
Good for the users? No.
Good for the companies? That remains to be seen.
Lots of companies trying to control their hardware sounds like a bad thing, like the early days of the computer industry. Open standards won out in the hardware biz in the mid-80's. Let's see if that happens again.
Listen, I don't hear anyone complaining they can't develop for the PS3 and XBOX and WII using flash.
Once upon a time, Rodney Allen Greenblat (who designed the characters for Parappa the Rapper) and I petitioned Macromedia to develop a Director "Projector" for the Playstation, so we could rapidly develop games using Lingo and Director. They refused. And Sony wouldn't have allowed it anyhow because they wanted to sell you their expensive developer's kit (and then they turned around 10 minutes later and sold the Yaroze). We successully created projectors that ran on the developer units for Pippin, but that system never went anywhere.
So this is all history repeating itself, again. And again. And again.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The world has moved beyond the point where everything with a CPU is a computer. The iPhone is an appliance.
But consider where this could lead. At some point, as appliances can do more and more, every product that an ordinary end user can buy will be an appliance. The only thing an appliance won't be able to do is make more applications for the appliance. "Computers" will primarily be for developing appliance apps and priced out of the general public's price range, just as they were decades ago, and you might even have to start a corporation or LLC and lease a dedicated office just to qualify to buy a computer, much as it is now with a video game console devkit. That is how proprietary software will finally beat GNU.
That was my thought as well. If flash worked well Apple would not be objecting to it. The problem is that it's bloated, buggy, and unstable. Sure, it's great for the content developers, but it's terrible for the users who have to put up with it's role as a resource hogging virus collector. Forget Flash, it doesn't belong on a computer.
If they really want to make a stament just don't release Photoshop and their other apps for Mac. Sure this will cost them quite a bit of money but for a part it can hurt a lot of professional Mac users and lure them back to Windows (I don't like Windows either but I prefer it above crApple) or let them release Linux versions of their products :)
First, this is just a really stupid argument. I'm not sure why people think this is a good idea. Adobe is obviously out for profit, you think they want flash on the iDevices because its better for their users? Yeah, keep living in your happy little world.
Next, the CS products get more bloated and slower with each release (with the exception of the 64bit version of PS for OSX in CS5, of course not many plugins yet support 64bit so you have to run it in 32bit mode until they do). I believe they're even now using AIR for their UI.
There's really no reason why many professionals would really need to upgrade anyway. Many are still using CS3. Yeah, PS in CS5 introduces the new "Content Aware Fill" which is pretty nice, but its not flawless and it just makes something that people have been doing for years easier (in some cases its still easier to do it the old fashioned way). There's nothing that you can do in CS5 that you can't do in an earlier version. with exception of loading really large image files. Of course, now that CS5 has been released for OSX that ability is out there. If CS6 didn't come out for mac (which would cost Adobe a lot in lost revenue), I'm sure the creative professionals would be more then content staying on an older version (at least until Apple released a competing app).
Plus waste power! Flash plugins keep my Vista and Win7 boxes from sleeping to save power. That was probably easier than debugging resume-from-sleep problems, and hey, Adobe doesn't have to pay my power bill.
[Try it yourself. Set a Vista or Win7 box to auto-sleep when idle. Then watch a short YouTube video. Leave the browser open and walk away. It will never sleep.]
How dare they write code that willingly compromises my computer! And then tell me that they're somehow enabling my freedom to be molested by Chinese/Eurotrash scriptkiddies! I'll go down to Fremont this afternoon and shit on their parking lot in response.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
That is indeed the reason. There was nothing wrong with the study, only the implications people are taking from it. iPhone OS authors collect from the very same app versions running on all three devices. Android developers have to release different versions of their app for different Android phones.
And of course it's international sales that matter.
Also it's obviously wrong because the size of the market for apps is: "apps sold", not "devices sold". Developers are dojng far better on iPhone than Android for versions of the same app. Orders of magnitude better.
Thus it's wrong to say that Android sales topping iPhone sales on that study means it's a bigger market. Wrong in several different ways.
For using that argument alone I say Fl_lCK Adobe. They've thrown themselves in with the other corporate azzhoes who don't want anyone looking at what they do too closely.
And Sarah Palin, and Rush "Don't Bogart that Prescription" Limbaugh, and someone I consider the finest working comedian today, Glen Beck.
Please publish your App, it really sounds interesting.
I may not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
Voltaire
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Because at the time Microsoft were judged to have a monopoly of personal computer operating systems. Apple does not have a monopoly of smartphone operating systems. That's the key legal (and moral) difference.
Apple should have the right to say what is going to run on the hardware that they support with guarantees that the hardware is going to work.
People have a lot of rights, it doesnt' mean they have to exercise them. OEMs had the right to allow only DOS/Windows on their machines.
MS had the right to sell Windows only to IBM and not to COMPAQ. You have the right to act like an ass. But don't complain when you get a reputation for being so and people start avoiding you if they can....
BTW, I hear that Android sales are booming.
This space for rent.
How much is that Flash development package going for?
To that small subset of developers who want to develop in Flash (or similar) maybe. But the majority are perfectly happy to use the native ObjC/Cocoa Touch platform.
More importantly they are benefiting end users, who will find theApp Store less polluted with shitty apps.
If Adobe is serious, they should take the position that if Apple is not allowing Flash development for its platforms then it follows that Apple no longer wants such development platforms running on its Macs, and as long as Flash content is not supported on iPhone or iPad then ongoing support and releases will not be available for the entire Creative Suite (of which Flash is a part) on OSX as of the current release. If Apple can exclude a specific product why can't Adobe?
My atari 2600 makes my tandy look like a sissy. Nothing like streaming some pr0n through the old 2600.
Android: pick a phone you like, lots of selection to meet different size, keyboard, and price point preferences.
iPhone: any device you like, just so long as it is this one. Oh and fuck you if you want to use it with Linux.
Don't I have the right to dictate to adobe that it should play .mp4 files for the sake of openness?
Then dictate with Flowplayer, a shim between your web page and .mp4 video. The trouble is that Apple is using the developer license agreement to ban shims between other platforms and iPhone OS APIs.
I'm not suggesting to build tools on top of Google or Facebook, but to develop their own customized stack of software built on top of open standards - HTML5, Python, PostgreSQL, etc. In other words, to follow Facebook and Google development practices.
There's nothing to stop you writing an app for an iPhone in Flash. Apple will just decline to sell it on their App Store. And that is their right.
Very true. Look at how Apple fleeces the iPhone users:
1) Profit on selling the device itself (either unlocked to consumer or to AT&T)
2) A nice MONTHLY cut of around $18 from AT&T from the subscribers min. of $70/month. (This is the real reason iPhone is exclusive to AT&T inspite of shitty service all around, notice how this isn't mentioned much here on /.?).
3) A FORCED 30% cut of all third party software sales for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.
No wonder Apple is wallowing in money, they found an almost perfect way to part fools with their money.
This space for rent.
"We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs"
So I should be able to run flash apps on my fully GPL computer with the open standard they're going to release for the flash virtual machine tomorrow, right? I expect I'll be getting an open spec for inner workings of their PDF and eReader DRM as well?
Or by "freely" do they mean vendor lock-in with a zero price binary blob that might run some content on a few platforms?
Using your argument, it would be ok if Dell or HP sold a combo hardware/software box that could only run manufacturer approved application. Selling a packaged combo, with a limited number of software options would minimize support cost and improve vendor margins. Software vendors would have to have their applications approved by Dell and could only sell their applications through Dell. And by the way, you'd need to use their approved browsers and accept whatever ads the manufacturer wanted to push at you. This model would improve PC reliability (only tested and approved applications could be run) and increase the manufacturer's revenue. Back in the old days, we called this crapware--but at least you could uninstall those applications or reinstall to OS (or the OS of your choice)..
Pretty much what Apple has done.
Once you buy it, it is no longer "their" device, it is yours.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Do you really suppose Apple is trying to lock users in to a system based on open standards? Is that even possible? No, what Apple is doing is locking Flash out.
If Adobe loves Apple, they have a funny way of showing it. When they ship versions of Flash Player for OS X that are even less efficient and even more buggy than the Windows versions, and publicly acknowledge that making Flash for OS X anything more than barely usable is a low priority because they'd rather work on the Windows and mobile versions, that doesn't sound like love to me.
This is just MY opinion.
The cell phone is rapidly becoming the only telephone for a lot of people. That is to say, there is no landline telephone in their home.
So, the telephone is an important device for people. Particularly when they need to call 911 for help.
I need medical help now. Paramedics. Ambulance, etc.
I grab my iPhone, only to discover that the battery is dead, thanks to the battery eating thing called Flash.
I grab my iPhone, only to discover that the OS has crashed hard, due to some Flash security fault and it won't reboot.
I grab my iPhone, only to discover that it has been 0wn3d by some Ukrainian spammers, thanks to a 0day exploit in the latest Adobe development tools, and it no longer works as a telephone.
I grab my iPhone, only to discover that it has been 0wn3d by some asshole in Singapore thanks to a 0day exploit in the latest Adobe development tools, and that if I want it to work, I have to PayPal him US$50.00.
So, in these hypthetical, yet potentially real, situations, who gets sued? Who gets the bad PR?
Not the spammers, not Adobe, not the asshole in Singapore.
It's Apple.
Used to be, before smartphones, all the OS did was handle the details in connecting to the cell network. Not a whole lot to screw up there.
Today, it's a different environment.
Apple doesn't want to be sued for the faults of Adobe or the malicious actions of others.
Apple doesn't want to risk having people die because of 0day exploits in development software.
That this happens to annoy some people who think that they have the absolute right to develop apps for iPhone OS and that Apple MUST let them use whatever tools they want, well. Too bad.
Go play in the Android sandbox. Don't buy Apple products that use iPhone OS.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
To that small subset of developers who want to develop in Flash (or similar) maybe. But the majority are perfectly happy to use the native ObjC/Cocoa Touch platform.
If devices like iPad are the future of computing, then I guess we can kiss a lot of languages goodbye unless they come from Cupertino and are blessed by Jobs, since even developers don't like jailbreaking(it's illegal according to Apple).
More importantly they are benefiting end users, who will find theApp Store less polluted with shitty apps.
You can write shitty apps in ObjC and people do it all the time. The App store is chock full of shitty apps like Fart apps. This banning of programming languages just makes sure that some good Apps are a pain for the developer to port, that's all.
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and iphones and ipad arent fragmented?
theres 3 differnet hardware versions of the iphone with a 4th coming in a few months. unless you target the lowest common denominator here it might not be fully compatible too. plus the ipad is different again as well.
Dear god, these two need to shut the hell up about each other already. Neither is as open as it claims itself to be, and neither is as bad as the other claims it to be. They both make a few good things, but they've becoming the annoying couple that ruins parties by constantly sniping at each other.
Does this mean adobe is going to provide better support for flash on linux ?
http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/
> This isn't about freedom, it's about a market choice. People have bought the iPhone and iPad in droves and have said, more or less, that the devices are compelling enough to buy even without Flash support.
Maybe for some that is true, but for others they are but sheep. Of course, those are the ones wondering why the website doesn't load correctly and don't even realize it's because Apple dictated that they cannot view it.
Regardless of what happens, think about this:
In good spirit of computer software evolution, the SOFTWARE must accommodate the USER. What Apple wants, its absurd - the USER must accommodate the SOFTWARE, for which (along with the hardware $$, and "innovation" $$), so the USER could accommodate them? Thats absurd!
Think about that, and think about Apple's relative competitor Google - G's spirit is to accommodate the user, and A's spirit is for you to pay mad $$$ for the product, and then "accommodate" it.
Apple's CEO Steve Jobs is full of shit. I read his letter, I agree with his letter, but he has the balls to act like he's the shit of all hardware/software, which he is not. His company may have incidentally taken a "pure" path, but that doesn't mean I should dish out $900 for an iPad, so I can sit there and be like "Oh OK, well, I know I paid $900.00 to not be able to watch movies online, or play games online, or do anything without Steve's approval."
If that (above) does not piss you off, you must be Steve's little bitch. /. is awesome!
iPhone OS authors collect from the very same app versions running on all three devices
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The ipad is distinctively different from the other devices. A developer probably isn't going to not make an ipad specific version because you can have a quarter size iphone version running. You also can't go the other way and have your ipad specific app run on an iphone. To me, this is fragmentation but somehow Apple gets a "pass" as usual.
And of course it's international sales that matter.
I love this. First it is sales "here" or there, and now it is international sales because there's no numbers on that. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say Apple is winning internationally at the moment. But let's suppose that changes because Google does have some players hitting other markets like Dell hitting the china market. What are you going to do then? Claim "it's the quality of the device that matters, not market share"?
Also it's obviously wrong because the size of the market for apps is: "apps sold", not "devices sold".
Marketing failure. The size of a market is defined by the target market. Just because you sold more on one market doesn't necessarily mean the size of that market is limited to your sales. What you are saying is equivalent to GM saying "we have 100% market share because the market is our customers and only them."
Developers are dojng far better on iPhone than Android for versions of the same app. Orders of magnitude better.
I'll give you a hint as to why. It isn't because Apple sells phones, it has more to do with the itunes store and the marketing they do for you. Right now the Android market application is basically crap in comparison. You can only search and browse. There are ratings but there is no way to look for "top rated" apps. There are no genres. There's no commercial on TV featuring your app. All of the marketing has to be done by you. With Apple, they help you do some of the marketing. That's what people don't get. The value isn't just in the phone, it is in how you do your marketing. If Google updates their marketing for apps or developers learn to market apps themselves, or a better middle man comes in with a better store, then you will start seeing more volume on android apps.
> Android may be a bigger market, but the iPhone I'm targeting with my app resides in the deeper pockets of people demonstrably more easily parted with their money for less reward, my friend.
The guy just said he's more interested in developing for the iPhone because the customers pay for the apps, and that's an example of 'less reward'?
Does not compute.
Forget the iPhone OS. I'm pissed that I can't do linux kernel development using Flash.
Since when does open-source development restrict my choice in tools, anyway?
I'm tired of the whining Adobe. You basically have ignored Apple for the last decade. Your products suck on their platform. You went for the lowest common denominator in development, which means, its mostly designed for Windows. Now that Apple has a dominant platform in the iPhone, you cry about it. Too bad.
Apple could certainly take the high road, and actually allow Flash, but not in the default configuration. Thus, end users would have to get it from the App Store knowingly. If it turned out to really be as bad as Apple claims, end users would be quickly saying, "hey, why the heck has my machine slowed to a crawl, and the battery life dropped to two hours?" Apple could put a prominent FAQ on it's website or make it the first scripted answer from support--"If you are experiencing sluggishness and reduced battery life, and have installed Flash via the App Store, please remove it, and check if your problem is solved before complaining more." Word on the street would be "Hey, don't install Flash because it cripples your iDevice." This would clearly shift the burden to Adobe--or they pick up the ball and run with it (i.e. engineer Flash from being a cpu/battery hog and security risk), or they loose brainshare/marketshare because they cannot do so (as Apple claims). Apple's actions are far from the high road even though they present them as that...
Until you go to them for support.
Dell would not fix a built in mic on one of our computers because we put XP on it instead of Vista.
Unless one can fix it themselves or can pay someone beside the manufacturer to fix it - the device is still their device.
There 3 different devices called the iphone, they do not even all have the same features.
In other words, where I think we differ is that I do not see a need to make every device that is capable of computing into a general purpose device.
It's people like you who keep me from being able to play tetris on my microwave! Updating twitter from my toaster is a right!
Track your TV Shows with your iPhone - FREE
Yeah, I forgot about all the flash applications I download through Xbox and Zune Marketplace.
Oh wait.
If HTML5 video becomes standard, I give 10 weeks for a kind of DRM to be implemented.
Want to bet? I would be surprised if there aren't XCode/MS Visual Studio projects in private alpha form _right now_.
You are targeting wrong guys, target who actually demands it from Adobe. You can start with number 1 DRM enabled Video distributor on the planet who these ads target, who abuses their own qt metadata to serve plain mp4 files, just to force people to install their player, who is afraid of what you can do with full flash on mobile so their fascist store will be irrelevant...
Anyway, enough bandwidth wasted...
It's not like he's asking for MPE/iX Flash.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How much is that Flash development package going for?
Flash Builder 4, for myself here in the US, would be 699 USD, or 299 USD if I was upgrading.
Reply to That ||
when neither of them are even close to being "open" or really staunch supporters of all things "open."
That discounts the entire backing of Webkit from Apple (used in almost every mobile device today) and also the strong HTML5 support they have given.
Not to mention the support for other projects, like CLANG/LLVM, GCC, ZeroConf, etc. etc.
Or the fact that without Apple, we'd still be buying DRM laden music online.
To claim Apple does nothing to support open standards is to ignore some very real good they have done.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
look at the recommended system. if some "designer" makes a cool new inefficient but RapidlyDevelopedApplication in flash and it runs at a glacial speed who will the user blame... they will think its their apple ipod that is "slow". when in actual fact the rad flash requires a core2 with 2gigs of ram and a dedicated video card just do some transparent vectors animation with a little gamma corrected colour space converted video. and it will only get worse, adobe uses the same model that microsoft uses, assuming that hardware is going to double in speed and halve in price therefore for them it is most efficient to just bloat it up so long as it works mean while a fresh install of windows7 takes 17gig, and the osx on an ipad is only 1gig. unfortunately the future is portable, in japan the primary means to access the internet is via a mobile phone or portable compute.
Maybe for some that is true, but for others they are but sheep. Of course, those are the ones wondering why the website doesn't load correctly and don't even realize it's because Apple dictated that they cannot view it.
Tomato. Tomato.
Apple didn't dictate they can't view it. Apple and the site creator together dictated it, by Apple not supporting Flash and by the Web page creator not using open standard HTML. Guess which one I think it would be better for myself and the industry as a whole to change?
So, what's your point?
Er... um...
Wow! Look at that really interesting thing over there!
[QD dashes into the woods, into the night]
Perhaps, gnash would be in different shape today if more people used and contributed to it. Its mailing lists are interesting though, very promising things happened lately. As I am on OS X/PPC, I can't try/test and don't have enough time/expertise anyway.
If I was on Linux/BSD, I would definitely give it a try or at least provide some bug reports.
Of course, if Adobe management had brains and if they allocated couple of their own developers, at least people with @adobe.com mails to Gnash, their image would be different. Obviously, today's management would directly fire and suggest have his brain checked.
What purpose does Flash being closed source serves to Adobe anyway? Codecs? Use Real Networks model than, /. user but very relevant to mobile users/content providers/device makers etc.
check https://www.helixproject.org/ . Player open, codecs not. Super cool patents are free to GPL code... It took some years for them to move to that model but they got saved from irrelevance and bankruptcy. I mean, they may be irrelevant to average
apologies for forgetting the right url, here is the Helix Community. See the stats they have too.
https://helixcommunity.org/
No company -- no matter how big or how creative -- should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.
No web site - no matter how big or how creative - should dictate what software I use to view content, or how I experience their content on the web.
If Adobe prevails on this basis, then I want to use the very same basis to force every web site that has video to also make the video available by a NON-FLASH means ... so I can have my choice, too.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Seriously Adobe? "Adobe's business philosophy is based on a premise that, in an open market, the best products will win in the end — and the best way to compete is to create the best technology and innovate faster than your competitors" I thought the best way was to create mediocre, overpriced, buggy software and then simply *buy* the competition
One should never throw the letter Q into a privet bush.
The iPhone is advertised as having hundreds of thousands of apps to install to do whatever you need from it. Sounds pretty general purpose to me.
Listen, bub, it's still a computer. Just because Apple tell you that it isn't so that they can refuse to let people develop for it doesn't make it so.
In war everyone looses, just some lose more than others.
Funny how nobody complains about game consoles
I beg to differ. Search recent Slashdot stories for "Other OS", such as this one.
No, fragmentation is what the Android platform has (And Symbian and MS Mobile too). What you describe there is called "backward compatibility" - as seen and welcomed on Windows, Macs and sometimes consoles (GameCube->Wii, PSI to PSII).
Additionally what you are missing is that app developers can indeed create and sell a single app which runs on an iPad in full screen with all the iPad widgets, and also runs on an iPhone or iPod Touch. It's called a Universal Application.
I've no idea what you mean. It sounds like bluster. I've only ever used worldwide market share, and whenever US market share is brought up I point out it's worldwide market share that counts. ALL sales that a company makes matters, not just the ones that happen to be in America. It's even more important here because we are talking about how big a market there is for developers of software on the platforms. Developers (at least for the Apple App Store) sell their apps internationally, not just to the US.
In part you didn't comprehend what I wrote, and in part you are just plain wrong. The size of the market for iPhone apps is the total number of apps sold by all app developers. It;s not the number sold by a singe developer, nor is it the number of devices sold.
I don't need a hint. I'm an iPhone developer. I know full well the reasons for the success of iPhone Apps and the relative failure of Android apps. Yes, a major part of it is how easy Apple makes it for users to find, buy and install apps from their App Store. But there's also plenty of other factors, including the point that people purchasing iPhones mostly do so because they WANT to run apps. Many of those Android sales are cheap or free generic phones bought by people who just want a phone.
Is it a phone or a computer? Make up your mind. sheeeh
And they do have every right to restrict what you do with it.. Don't like the rules, choose a different vendor as they are NOT a monopoly.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The creators and still pushers of the anti-interoperability WWW technologies #1 and #2 (Flash and PDF) calling for freedom.
Apple is free to go with the web to its full potential by embracing standards. So please Adobe guys leave the web alone and focus on your photo/video/magazine editing products.
Linux on iPhone != iPhone on Linux.
... If that statement were applied to your desktop you'd be seeing red and you know it. Let's change it a little:
"Microsoft is only trying to 'stop' you when you use their OS. They aren't trying to stop you from using Firefox or Chrome or whatever on some other OS"...
If the above were the case instead of "limited" device like an ipad or iphone, far more people would have an issue with it.
The difference being that Microsoft is an established monopoly in a mature market. If Microsoft sneezes, the world gets a cold.
The iPhone is one of many competitors in a highly dynamic market, and the iPad is an interesting entry in a nascent market.
never mind that Android is the bigger market for smartphones. It does not consider the market OUTSIDE of smarthphones which also includes iPads and iPod touches.
Ah, a slippery slope argument. The fact is that Apple does NOT have a monopoly of the market, and people who want to develop in some other language has got plenty of choices to do so. And there's not even the merest hint of a suggestion that Apple is going to be the monopoly vendor of computing devices.
There are a lot of shitty apps, and a lot of excellent apps. As I said, if Flash and their ilk were allowed there would be MORE shitty apps. It's a favour to consumers to keep the signal to noise ratio on the App Store as high as possible, and not allowing Flash apps helps that ratio.
There are 100 million Android devices? (Even if you ignore the fact that they do not support the same code..)/ I think you should brush up on the comprehension part of your reading..
You are wrong. Adobe wants to stop you from developing useful content for ALL OF THE INTERNET OF STANDARDS. They want you to break the standard and they want more and more people to pay for the means to create it because of this illusion that it is required for "good" content.
ADOBE FLASH IS NOT A STANDARD. Stop treating it as such and let Apple do what they're doing.
Neither handheld Linux nor Windows Mobile seems to be restricting anything anywhere near a game console or the App Store.
By "Windows Mobile" you appear to mean "old versions of Windows Mobile". On Windows Phone 7, Microsoft has veto power over apps. But then Apple's iPhone developer program copied Microsoft's XNA Creators Club anyway.
The iPhone SDK makes it very easy to be able to write code that runs on all of the devices and takes advantage of the features on newer platforms. All of the devices so far support iPhone OS 4.0.
You simply can not say the same thing for Android. There is a huge difference...
They also distribute free apps without cost to developers and all developers can send out all the free updates for their apps they want. I suppose they do take their 30% of Free too.
It was sales numbers in the US (not market share) and it includes millions of free devices. I guess we can say the people who bought iPhones were actually willing to spend money..
All written using Visual Assembler for Windows, right?
If I make a tool that takes my game written in whatever language and spits out C# that targets the XNA APIs, Microsoft has no problem with it.
Oh yes it does, for at least these three reasons: no procedural audio, no conlangs, and no ports. I've written about these XNA deficiencies in another article.
Curious why you did not use the direct Lisp to VHDL translator. What benefits do you derive by moving your code through LabView and Fortran.
A game system is totally different.
In what specific way? Why have the the makers of NES and newer consoles closed them to indies?
If you want that go get a N900.
I'd like to see and touch an N900 before I buy it so that I can assure myself that it won't be horribly unergonomic. But Nokia doesn't have a store in my area. Where can I try an N900? And why does it cost almost as much as three iPod Touch devices?
Also on the Microsoft gaming thing, I think you ought to try PC's out. You can run just about any game
Can I run couch multiplayer games on a PC?
Fundamentally it all comes down to this: for a given amount of time developing, you're going to make lots more money working on an app for the iPhone than an app for Android. Like one or two orders of magnitude more.
and then later retroactively removed. Apple has never sold the iPhone/iPad with the ability to run Flash. Big difference.
And Apple is doing that out of the good of their heart for free app developers who should be forever indebted to Apple for not charging for their free apps.
Not.
They do that so that the iPhone becomes attractive to users(because of free apps available) so that the users can be charged as per my #1, #2 and #3 in my post above.
So does Apple help them in any way monetarily for making their devices more attractive? No! They just fleece them too, leading to #4 to be added to my post above:
4) Take $99 from every iPhone developer that submits to Apps store (even those who develop and distribute Apps for free, thus making the iDevices more attractive).
This space for rent.
Easy solution: buy Android. And you don't need AT&T either this way. In the end Apple shot themselves in the foot by locking out all of the other carriers for too long.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they (Apple) are already doing exactly that -- either building all-new apps from scratch, or revamping the OSS you mentioned. After all, you can just look at iWork versus Microsoft Office to see that they've got the stones to take on the entrenched giants.
Warning: Contents May Be Flammable. Keep Out Of Reach Of Children.
There's an easy solution to this. Adobe simply announces that the next version of Creative Suite will not be supported on OSX. Then, we see who blinks first.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I just boycott all companies with 5 letter names beginning with 'A' and ending with 'e'. Problem solved.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
How much time does it take to port an iPhone app to Android as compared to writing an entirely new iPhone app? (I have no idea myself, having developed for neither platform.) The number of Android users is growing rapidly, and all the articles i've found so far saying that the difference is multiple orders of magnitude are from over six months ago. Being able to port a project several times faster, even an order of magnitude faster, than writing a new one from scratch isn't entirely unreasonable.
Also the original poster seemed to be implying that individual Android owners buy less apps, which may have been just due to a poor choice of metaphors. Irrespective of the total size of the two markets, i'm not convinced that the average iPhone owner is either richer or more free with their money than the average Android owner, not based on the evidence of the respective app stores at any rate.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
That is about the most concise, accurate summary of Apple fanboys I have yet seen.
You basically pointed out that the iPhone is not commodity hardware and that Apple is taking the console type sales route. Thank you captain obvious who ignores any and all benefits some people get over other systems.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Or the developer chose to use a non-standard application on their web site...
This may be a flawed analogy, but wouldn't it be akin to a company releasing a car that only ran on diesel? That impedes all the companies that sell only "normal" gasoline. They're stifling competition! If you want to use "normal" gasoline, buy a car that runs on that.
That is more than flawed... its plain wrong.
Lets try and fix it.
It would be akin to a company releasing a car that only ran on diesel, preventing companies from creating diesel in unapproved ways (from algae, corn, discarded food products), and then having some approval process for checking diesel that would prevent certain companies from selling fuel for the car.
So when is Adobe shipping CS5 for Linux? Or a PhotoShop Elements app for the iPad? I should be free to access my favorite photo applications on Linux and on portable devices, right?
When are they removing DRM (activation) from their products? When I pay real money for a product, I like to be treated as a valued customer -- not as a potential criminal.
Ah, a slippery slope argument. The fact is that Apple does NOT have a monopoly of the market, and people who want to develop in some other language has got plenty of choices to do so. And there's not even the merest hint of a suggestion that Apple is going to be the monopoly vendor of computing devices.
What about this scary scenario, Both Apple and MS hold ~50% of the market(mobile or otherwise), and hence are not a monopoly and can trample on developer's rights. Don't tell me that's unlikely, just look at Windows Phone 7 Series.
The iPhone is (one of?) the first general computing devices to ban other languages, and others are learning from their success.
Also, you don't need Apple to be a monopoly, just a big player is enough to affect software development.
What about articles such as:
http://gizmodo.com/5506692/ipad-is-the-future
http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/ipad/
http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175600/The_iPad_is_the_future_for_home_computing
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/02/ipad-the-destroyer-19-things-it-will-kill/
Surely they are more than a merest hint of a suggestion?
There are a lot of shitty apps, and a lot of excellent apps. As I said, if Flash and their ilk were allowed there would be MORE shitty apps. It's a favour to consumers to keep the signal to noise ratio on the App Store as high as possible, and not allowing Flash apps helps that ratio.
So, lets kill a ton of good Flash Apps and content on the Web just because there will be some more shitty apps to sift and search through? And here I thought storage, bandwidth and power of servers on the internet was dirt cheap for a company wallowing in cash like Apple.
This space for rent.
But that's OK because according to a recent news article Android is now a bigger market to shoot for anyway.
No, it's not. There are more iPhone OS devices out there than there are Android devices. Even limiting ourselves to the timeframe the article you've cited, more iPhone OS devices were sold in that time period.
What did happen, is more Android phones were sold than iPhones, in the US. Notable, sure, but in no way whatsoever does it mean that the Android market is larger. Even taking the mere notion that it is as serious is rather absurd when you consider the popularity of the iPhone.
The desktop G5s were fine. The problem was that IBM and Motorola/FreeScale were very slow to come up with mobile G5s. This was a big problem for Apple (especially as the trend in Mac sales was more and more towards the portable market.)
Around the time that Jobs announced the transition to x86, I believe IBM finally did produce a portable G5. But by then, it wasn't just about that one chip, it was about incentives. IBM's incentives were to produce Power (not PowerPC) chips for its high-end machines, and to produce chips for use in all three of the main video game systems (XBox/360, PlayStation 3, Wii). Motorola/Freescale was mainly interested in selling a bunch of PowerPC chips to the embedded market. Apple was IBM's only real desktop/laptop PowerPC CPU customer, and didn't have a whole lot of leverage.
By contrast, Intel's main business is producing CPUs for desktop and laptop PCs. Apple could switch to Intel, and be sure that Intel wasn't going to decide to prioritize (say) chips for video games or car engines, over the chips that Apple needs. Furthermore, Apple has a larger market share than just about any other single PC vendor. That makes them a "big fish" (like HP or Dell) in Intel's eyes. "Big fish" customer of a vendor who wants to produce the chips you need is not a bad place to be.
No wonder Apple is wallowing in money, they found an almost perfect way to part fools with their money.
I remember when I was a kid and thought that everyone who didn't share my exact set of values was naive and deserved my contempt. Boy, was I a dumbass.
and iphones and ipad arent fragmented?
Not in comparison to Android. Any "fragmentation" in the iPhone market is really easy to cover as a developer. The fragmentation in the Android market would be quite a challenge to stay on top of. We're talking orders of magnitude more difficulty.
So, no, relatively speaking, iPhones and iPad are not fragmented.
add option and let the users decide...?
No...? Your right. Apple users are waaaay toooo dumb to decide.
Very true. Look at how Apple fleeces the iPhone users:
1) Profit on selling the device itself (either unlocked to consumer or to AT&T)
As opposed to HTC, Motorola, RIM, etc., who sell their products at a loss? How do you suppose they make money? Volume?
2) A nice MONTHLY cut of around $18 from AT&T from the subscribers min. of $70/month. (This is the real reason iPhone is exclusive to AT&T inspite of shitty service all around, notice how this isn't mentioned much here on /.?).
Unsure how this fleeces the users. AT&T pays this to keep exclusivity (assuming the contract is still the same). If they didn't pay this, it's highly unlikely they'd lower the rate for iPhone users by $18.
3) A FORCED 30% cut of all third party software sales for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.
No one is forced to do anything. Apple does take 30% for paid iPhone apps, but this pretty much covers the running of the store, including things like credit card transaction fees, bandwidth, servers, admins, and so on. Apple does not make a significant profit from the iTunes Store or the App Store. And again, hard to see how this fleeces the users.
No wonder Apple is wallowing in money, they found an almost perfect way to part fools with their money.
Of course, because the only person who would buy an iPhone is a fool? Because AT&T are fools for paying for exclusivity? Because developers are fools for voluntarily paying for Apple to provide a service?
There is a fool in this equation, all right, but from the sounds of it, it doesn't seem likely that you've sent any money to Apple.
Not since the monopoly lawsuit in '98
Apple is only trying to "stop" you when you use their devices.
Rly? Wow. I thought Apple was selling the iPhone, I didn't know they were loaning them out. Someone should seriously consider telling the customers...
iWork is still no MS Office. I have both and use both. Pages is extremely useful for us to create brochures and datasheets that look nice without having to have InDesign and I find it easier to work with than Word for publishing tasks. It makes up for the lack of publisher on Mac. I also like Numbers as well. I find it to be the best spreadsheet for our requirements.
But for word processing Word is still king in my book. And I still like PowerPoint better than Keynote.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
And Apple is doing that out of the good of their heart for free app developers who should be forever indebted to Apple for not charging for their free apps.
Who said anything like that?
Not.
Oh, I see. It was a straw man.
They do that so that the iPhone becomes attractive to users(because of free apps available) so that the users can be charged as per my #1, #2 and #3 in my post above.
In other words, they do it because serving the customer's needs and wants helps them make money later. The monsters!
4) Take $99 from every iPhone developer that submits to Apps store (even those who develop and distribute Apps for free, thus making the iDevices more attractive).
Developer tools don't write themselves, don't provide technical support for themselves, and don't host and provide bandwidth for themselves.
Apple is happy with web apps--they currently have probably the most standards compliant web browser on any mobile device--it does better on ACID3 than the version of Firefox I'm using right now.
When the iPhone was released, web apps were the path that Apple was pushing for 3rd party apps--and at the time Slashdot was all atwitter that they wouldn't allow 3rd parties to write native apps. I guess you were arguing at the time for Apples side?
Are you pissed off about that? it's a cell phone. You can run whatever you want on your Mac or PC at home.
My ipod nano doesn't run apps.
Nothing insightful about a strawman.
IMHO
are the reason that I have all manner of friends and relatives asking me how to make their computer start behaving nicely.
I've never had that problem from anyone with an iPhone...and I rarely have that problem from users of a Mac...I wonder why that is?
People with iPhone's are happy, people with Mac's are happy. People with PCs and shitphones are often unhappy.
I guess freedom is about maximizing the people who are unhappy? really? that's the only solution here?
How about people who want an appliance that just works simply and keeps them from shooting themselves in the foot should buy from Apple and power users should get PCs running slackware and an Android phone. Then everyone's happy, right? So why are you so miserable?
Yes, how dare a company profit from building something. Those evil profiteers. Think about the children.
Android: pick a phone you like, lots of selection to meet different size, keyboard, and price point preferences.
Yet people still overwhelmingly choose iPhone over Android. This also ensures that the iPhone will outsell any particular Android handset, even if Android overtakes iPhone in market share.
iPhone: any device you like, just so long as it is this one. Oh and fuck you if you want to use it with Linux.
Yes, Apple has ceded the Linux user market. I doubt this is much of an issue. For comparison, there are more iPhone OS users than total Linux end-users.
Microsoft doesn't exactly like it when you crack their XBoxes and Zunes either. How is that different than Apple?
Flash (either by Macromedia, or now Adobe) has never been great. The only place it's been okay is Windows and for a long time it had poor support in OSX and little to no support in Linux (there were even mildly successful attempts at reverse engineering it to at least provide something). Flash is the holder of a fairly atrocious security record much like its new found sibling, Adobe Reader. Flash has also always had very poor video performance when compared to desktop streaming video applications and has never supported more than 2-channel audio. To utilize most of Flash's video playback features you are required to use their proprietary flv format. Where is the openness in that? I see it was conveniently not mentioned in the Adobe letter.
Scribd is going HTML5 and hopefully other document providers do also. HTML5 can defeat Flash paper and PDF. Text is text and it can be formatted and displayed in any fashion, in any font, for any medium with HTML5 and CSS and sometimes a little JavaScript.
Apple has it's share of bullshit. The closed, guarded app store which allows religious bigot applications but not political satire is completely offensive and I will never own one of their products. Their insistence on HTML5 but only supporting their chosen audio/video formats is equally distressing. iTunes/iPod is just as poor with a lack of offering and supporting open standards audio such a FLAC.
All three are quite good at corporate spin. Adobe is avoiding portions it's and Macromedia's poor track record with Flash and [Acrobat] Reader. Adobe is trying to avert the loss of more web multimedia market share. Apple is avoiding mention of it's limited acceptance policy which not only judges functionality but also application content in what I would consider is a biased fashion. Apple is trying to not just gain some market share but push Adobe's current solution out of the set of viable options for web developers as they have more vested in codecs/devices/desktop applications then web-based playback solutions. Microsoft is playing the vulture card. They have Expression which I can see as becoming a HTML5/JavaScript/CSS IDE or a Flash IDE and Microsoft does know it's way around when developing an IDE. If Adobe loses this PR scramble and Flash is defeated, they will surely follow suit, replace the Flash portion of Creative Suite with an HTML5 Canvas App, and refocus their objectives.
Personally, as a web developer and off-again, on-again Linux user, I hope HTML5 succeeds with the inclusion of open audio and video standards also. I've dealt with enough poor support from the world of Flash on the development and client ends. I've dealt with the problems it's wrought upon the world of disabled web users.
So there is at least one thing to stop me from writing a program in flash on the iphone? ;).
1) Profit on selling the device itself (either unlocked to consumer or to AT&T)
Making a profit on a sale -- of a tangible good no less -- is now fleecing?
2) A nice MONTHLY cut of around $18 from AT&T from the subscribers min. of $70/month. (This is the real reason iPhone is exclusive to AT&T inspite of shitty service all around, notice how this isn't mentioned much here on /.?).
Unverified and irrelevant. The service charges are not higher for the iPhone versus any other phone with the same plan. You also get visual voicemail AT&T might be a ripoff, but that's on AT&T.
3) A FORCED 30% cut of all third party software sales for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.
You say tomato, I say 70% royalties while maintaining ownership of published material. That's a far cry from what the old school publishing/distribution channels would provide, where royalties are exclusively for established authors and certainly never approach 70% of gross sales. And let's not forget that the Android Market takes exactly the same cut.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
All except the original iPhone though.
Having just downloaded the Adobe AIR version of Zinio Reader (admittedly a beta) on my mac I would have to agree that people should be protected from bad experiences based on crap software, or software that isn't appropriate for certain devices. For reading digital magazines this product is discouraging, painful and would ruin the business of online magazines. Thankfully the old reader still works.
(I've actually developed in Authorware, once.)
You shouldn't hang me on a hook, Johnny. My father hung me on a hook once. Once.
Very true. Look at how Apple fleeces the iPhone users:
1) Profit on selling the device itself (either unlocked to consumer or to AT&T)
As opposed to HTC, Motorola, RIM, etc., who sell their products at a loss? How do you suppose they make money? Volume?
For HTC, Motorola and RIM, #1 is the only way to make profit and they're still doing okay. Read the 'fleecing' part and the entire post before rushing to comment?
2) A nice MONTHLY cut of around $18 from AT&T from the subscribers min. of $70/month. (This is the real reason iPhone is exclusive to AT&T inspite of shitty service all around, notice how this isn't mentioned much here on /.?).
Unsure how this fleeces the users. AT&T pays this to keep exclusivity (assuming the contract is still the same). If they didn't pay this, it's highly unlikely they'd lower the rate for iPhone users by $18.
Unsure indeed. So where are all those hundreds of millions coming from? Straight from AT&T's profits? Or from iPhone users?
3) A FORCED 30% cut of all third party software sales for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.
No one is forced to do anything. Apple does take 30% for paid iPhone apps, but this pretty much covers the running of the store, including things like credit card transaction fees, bandwidth, servers, admins, and so on. Apple does not make a significant profit from the iTunes Store or the App Store. And again, hard to see how this fleeces the users.
If the app store doesn't make a significant profit then why not open up software installing instead of wasting money on iron clad DRM and multiple TPMs? Atleast then they can't be blamed for blocking some apps or allowing others? Maybe others store can take less than 30% and include things like credit card transaction fees, bandwidth, servers, admins, and so on?
No wonder Apple is wallowing in money, they found an almost perfect way to part fools with their money.
Of course, because the only person who would buy an iPhone is a fool? Because AT&T are fools for paying for exclusivity? Because developers are fools for voluntarily paying for Apple to provide a service?
There is a fool in this equation, all right, but from the sounds of it, it doesn't seem likely that you've sent any money to Apple.
How many iPhone users know about how much of their money goes to Apple? They just pay AT&T and the software assuming that it's for phone service and for Apps. AT&T are not fools, they know people buy the iPhone just because others have it and it's shiny and suffer with it even at locations where AT&T service sucks balls and other cell providers' signals are great. The developers are not fools either, they just don't have many options right now because of Apple's monopoly on mobile software sales.
Also, ad hominem much?
You simply can not say the same thing for Android.
Yes, we can.
I have an app the runs on several android device, and the wetab.
Suck that trebeck.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
3) Since you can ONLY use that as a way to get your apps on iPhone,s it's pretty much forced.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
have to release different versions of their app for different Android phones.
umm what? Why do you think that?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Those are sales results for one quarter. There were a few other quarters that happened before that one.
"I know full well the reasons for the success of iPhone Apps and the relative failure of Android apps."
clearly, you don't.
Android has been far easier for me to work with the the iPhone OS.
Maybe your an idiot, or maybe your just to emotional attached to apple, I don't know. I do know you don't seem to know much about the Android OS.
I prefer not being locked to the Apple store.
" But there's also plenty of other factors, including the point that people purchasing iPhones mostly do so because they WANT to run apps."
AS does anyone with a smart phone, it's the point.
"Many of those Android sales are cheap or free generic phones bought by people who just want a phone."
Most people, consider that kind of versatility a good thing in an OS.
"The size of the market for iPhone apps is the total number of apps sold by all app developers."
no. the market is the people who may buy an app. i.e. people who can run them. the number of apple devices. no one without an apple device will buy them.
The size of available apps is the number of apps.
The market for shoes is people who need shoes, not the total number of available shoes.
Hey, good luck selling your app, but don't go spouting off about crap you don't know.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And, those jailbroken devices are no longer under warranty, of course.
Sure, and your car is no longer under warranty because you're using properly-specced yet third-party tires... Where the problem is directly related to software configuration gone wrong after the jailbreaking, yes. In other areas, like the battery, no.
You can't saturate something you can't nail down long enough to write code for.
Why bother
There are devices running Android that are not phones as well. However, the fact that because it is a special version of Android means almost certainly you need to compile for that specific version unless you can get SDKs from the vendor guaranteed to handle version differences. On the iPhone you can make choices during run time about what OS version you are running and adjust your functionality to accommodate that, it's just not that easy on Android.
Why bother
I would far more upset losing the use of my special-purpose computing appliance as a phone (guess which I have) due to poorly written third party apps than I am with Apple restricting those apps.
Shades of MacOS 8. It's a good thing they're protecting you.
In other words, where I think we differ is that I do not see a need to make every device that is capable of computing into a general purpose device.
No, I think it's where you have a general purpose computing device that you're happy to have locked in simple-mode.
I'd be happy my phone ship in simple-mode, where I couldn't accidentally leave a torrent program running and draining the battery/bandwidth, but I can't imagine why I'd be happy to have a device that could do what I wanted and just wouldn't.
Android developers have to release different versions of their app for different Android phones.
no they dont. they never have, and never will.
Develop for Android 1.5. One app - runs on ALL android devices (not just phones).
Sure, you may have to develop for different screen sizes, but Android provides for this - and the issue is present with the iPhone/iPad/iPod as well.
IF you need features not present in Android 1.5, then your app wont run on devices that run Android 1.5, which means you still only create one version of your app, but it will run on less devices.
Stop the misinformation already!
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
The iPhone SDK makes it very easy to be able to write code that runs on all of the devices and takes advantage of the features on newer platforms. All of the devices so far support iPhone OS 4.0.
You simply can not say the same thing for Android. There is a huge difference...
why not? develop for Android 1.5 and it will run on all android devices.
The only missing part is taking advantage of features on newer platforms, but I imagine this would only affect a very small percentage of apps. As the API progresses, I expect this gap to be closed.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
I find it funny that "number of items sold" is no longer a good enough metric for some people.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
So, no, relatively speaking, iPhones and iPad are not fragmented.
You're right, but 'owning' an iPhone app basically amounts to being in charge of a small potted plant in somebody else's walled garden.
Take $99 from every iPhone developer that submits to Apps store
Isn't it $99 once a year, every year? And don't they force sale of an Intel Mac on each developer as well? (I haven't looked around to see if the suite runs on a hackintosh. It's kind of a scary thing to wonder about in public. The long knives of the mac zealots would probably come out quickly.)
Developer tools don't write themselves, don't provide technical support for themselves, and don't host and provide bandwidth for themselves.
Ummm. This is Slashdot. Ever heard of the GNU toolchain? Even Apple uses big chunks of it, btw.
Oh, right. This is apple.slashdot.org. My mistake.
Android has been far easier for me to work with the the iPhone OS.
Ahh, but has it been easier for you to develop apps and sell them on it? How many versions of your Android apps do you make for how many resolutions?
Maybe your[sic] an idiot...
I'm not normally a grammar nazi, but if you're going to call someone an idiot maybe you should learn to spell all the words in that sentence fragment to avoid looking comical?
I prefer not being locked to the Apple store.
That is, perhaps, admirable.
" But there's also plenty of other factors, including the point that people purchasing iPhones mostly do so because they WANT to run apps."
AS does anyone with a smart phone, it's the point.
Not really. According to research by various business technology publications, only about half of iPhone users ever buy an application and only about one in five of Android users ever buy one.
"Many of those Android sales are cheap or free generic phones bought by people who just want a phone."
Most people, consider that kind of versatility a good thing in an OS.
Versatility is good, but it also means the potential sales of apps on Android are less per unit than with iPhones. The previous poster's point being, that you can't say X people buy iPhones every month and X people buy Android phones that same month therefor applications should sell about the same on both.
"The size of the market for iPhone apps is the total number of apps sold by all app developers."
no. the market is the people who may buy an app. i.e. people who can run them. the number of apple devices. no one without an apple device will buy them.
You are incorrect. In business terms a market is (quoting Merriam Webster) "a demand for a particular commodity or service". That is to say, the number of people looking to buy an application, not the number of people that could buy an application because they have the hardware.
The market for shoes is people who need shoes, not the total number of available shoes.
The market for shoes is judged by how many shoes are sold a month, not by how many people might or could buy shoes. The grandparent poster is correct that the number of sales is the normal measure of the size of a market.
The market for shoes is people who need shoes, not the total number of available shoes.
No, the market for shoes is the umber of people who can buy shoes. People who can't afford shoes because supply is limited are not counted.
Hey, good luck selling your app, but don't go spouting off about crap you don't know.
Good day Mister Pot, may I introduce you to Squire Kettle... why you both seem to share the same coloration!
Although I think Apple can truly be a-holes...
'We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs,' the letter states.
I can't play Flash in the Lynx browser. I can't play Flash on the Atari Lynx either, but that doesn't even have internet connectivity, let alone a web browser. Sorry Adobe, what's you point again?
'No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.'
Adobe, just so we're clear on this, you are dumb-asses. Your own Flash 10.0 EULA excludes Apple from including Flash on their iPod/iPhone/iPad platform:
3.1 Adobe Runtime Restrictions. You will not use any Adobe Runtime on any non-PC device or with any embedded or device version of any operating system. For the avoidance of doubt, and by example only, you may not use an Adobe Runtime on any (a) mobile device, set top box (STB), handheld, phone, web pad, tablet and Tablet PC (other than with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and its successors), electronic billboard or other digital signage, Internet appliance or other Internet-connected device, PDA, medical device, ATM, telematic device, gaming machine, home automation system, kiosk, remote control device, or any other consumer electronics device, (b) operator-based mobile, cable, satellite, or television system or (c) other closed system device. For information on licensing Adobe Runtime for use on such systems please visit http://www.adobe.com/go/licensing.
In other words, you're launching a public humiliation campaign against Apple in an effort to extort licensing fees from them. Way to go.
First thing I thought of was the restrictive technology in Photoshop that detects currency and screws with your image. And is Adobe going to support Ogg Vorbis in HTML5? So we have the choice of how we encode our videos, that is, with a *known* patent-bomb like h.264, or a (so far) free and clear codec, e.g. Ogg.
Because you know, I'd love to have the freedom to choose my codec and work with pictures of my currency... and then there are those Adobe PDF documents where I can't copy for pasting later, even though fair use dictates my right to do so; oh, and hey, where is Adobe AIR for AmigaOS 4.1? Wait, you want to have a CHOICE about where you put your hard-earned effort based on your ideas about the platform? Well, imagine that. :) Funny you're so incensed about the manufacturer of a platform having a choice about what tech it allows on-board, eh?
Oh, and BTW, I don't want your sucky mouse-over tech. As far as I'm concerned, if I didn't click it, it shouldn't be doing anything. One of the most annoying things on the web is when my mouse happens to cross over some box on the way to something I *do* want to click, and the damn thing jumps up in the middle of my display, blocks my view of the page, and begins to play some inane bit of crapvertising, which won't go away until I figure out the advertiser's version of "close me." Thanks a whole bloody lot for THAT, Adobe. Menus that fly up when I didn't click them aren't much better.
There is exactly one good thing about flash: I can generally turn that crap off by getting rid of the flash code infestation. DLLs or plug-ins or whatever. And when something says "you need flash", I just say "liar" and go on my merry way. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
For comparison, there are more iPhone OS users than total Linux end-users.
Not for much longer, if Android sales keep growing.
Care for some castor oil? It'll make swallowing your words so much easier.
What did happen, is more Android phones were sold than iPhones, in the US. Notable, sure, but in no way whatsoever does it mean that the Android market is larger.
Actually, that's exactly the only thing it does mean.
Don't use it.
Since when does everyone have to bend over for every different interest out there. I don't have an iPhone, iPod, or iPad and have no plans on getting any of them.
See how easy that is?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
It's amazing how people seem to think jailbreaking indelibly and permanently breaks an iPxx device. You can update them back to stock firmware before you take it to the Apple store. I guess not if it fails in the wrong way, of course, but they would probably just reflash the firmware themselves at the store if you brought one in with a dead battery and it acted at all 'unusual' when they got the new battery in it and were testing it. Are there really 'CRC police' at the Apple store freaking out about this stuff?
My guess would be Apple's response would be to fork or support programs like GIMP and Inkscape and throw developers at them and overhaul their UI's to Apple's standards.
I'd like to think that, but Apple isn't much for supporting OSS user space apps. They tend to acquire existing closed products and then throw money and developers into bringing them up to speed. They'd be more likely to buy Pixelmator or Corel or Lineform.
I've seen attitudes like yours as long as I've known Apple Developers, which is back into the early 90's. You like your little sandbox that Apple provides you, and the monopoly on their platform that they give you. There's a healthy but small premium market that you satisfy and your place is secure in it. You're one of Jobs' pedigree poodles.
You probably don't even have an inkling what the GP was getting at when they said "good Apps are a pain for the developer to port". The keyword there is port, and I bet you missed it. Multi-platform. That's scary shit when you're a poodle fed little tins of fancy dog food and living in someone's walled garden.
Lots of good code is multi-platform. Lots of people write code for more than one platform. And lots of stuff is already written and ready to be ported. It's probably not written in Objective-C though, so never mind....
Aftermarket bolton parts can and do void warranties. Take the stock head off your engine, and put a high performance head on, then go back to the distributor to tell him about engine problems. Or, have a shift kit put into your transmission.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Right now, if you're unemployed, you can get the Flash Suite for free from Adobe. I guess they figure there are a bunch of unemployed developers out of work who might want to bone up on their skills with a free Adobe suite. It's pretty cool, and you can sign up on Adobe's site for it. You get your license in about a week.
First of all, this: "Maybe your an idiot, or maybe your just to emotional attached to apple, I don't know. " is juvenile and pointless.
I've been working in the smartphone industry, as a programmer, for more than a decade, including consultancy for several of the manufacturers. What do you know? Nothing you've demonstrated here.
Well whoopee do. It certainly hasn't been for others. e.g.:
"We've spoken with a number of high profile Android application developers. All of them, without exception, have told me they are extremely frustrated with Android right now. For the iPhone, they build once and maintain the code base. On Android, they built once for v.1.5, but are getting far less installs than the iPhone.
"And now they're faced with a landslide of new handsets, some running v.1.6 and some courageous souls even running android v.2.0. All those manufacturers/carriers are racing to release their phones by the 2009 holiday season, and want to ensure the hot applications will work on their phones. And here's the problem - in almost every case, we hear, there are bugs and more serious problems with the apps.
"There are whispers of backwards and forwards compatibility issues as well, making the problem even worse.
"More than one developer has told us that this isn't just a matter of debugging their existing application to ensure that it works on the various handsets. They say they're going to have to build and maintain separate code for various Android devices. Some devices seem to have left out key libraries that are forcing significant recoding efforts, for example. With others, it's more of a mystery."
http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/11/a-chink-in-androids-armor/
No one else cares what your preference is.
That's where you lack of knowledge of the industry shows. Most people DON'T install any third party apps, they just used the ones that are built in. iPhone has changed that pattern, but as it has a minority market share, its still true that most people don't install third party apps on smartphones.
Wrong. You don't understand the concept. The market for shoes is the total number of shoes sold in a period of time for all manufacturers. Divide the number of shoes sold by a single manufacturer by this figure, and you get their market share.
I don't need your luck, nor your inflated and mistaken sense of what you think you know.
Sure. It's a nice place to be.
If it makes you feel happy to put a nonsensical label on it.
No I didn't miss it. You're right it's scary shit. And usually very ugly shit compared with software targeted to a specific platform.
Not nearly as much as is very shitty indeed. The specialist is in virtually all cases better than the jack of all trades. Certainly it's possible and quite reasonable to make models which are cross platform. But cross platform UIs? Shit.
If it's engine level in C or C++, then there's no problem using it on OS X or iPhone OS. You can mix them in with ObjC UIs no problem. Again, if it's UI code, then good riddance, it'd be shit.
becomes a flame war between the iPhone and Android in 3...2...1...
All in all, I guess I love both Apple and Adobe, because the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/23/1616221/Google-Android-mdash-a-Universe-of-Incompatible-Devices?from=rss
Yes, some idiots want to exclude from "number of items sold" the number of items that were sold in countries other than the US. Very funny indeed.
What did happen, is more Android phones were sold than iPhones, in the US. Notable, sure, but in no way whatsoever does it mean that the Android market is larger.
Actually, that's exactly the only thing it does mean.
No, it doesn't, but to be fair, I wasn't completely clear in my statement. Android only outsold the iPhone during the last quarter in the US. Both in the US and worldwide, there are still far more iPhones than Android phones.
In addition, this did not count iPod Touches. Last quarter, more iPhone OS devices were sold in the US than Android devices (in fact, I'd wager that more iPhone OS devices were sold in the US alone than Android devices worldwide).
So, no. In no way whatsoever does it mean that the Android market is bigger. Not even close.
So, no, relatively speaking, iPhones and iPad are not fragmented.
You're right, but 'owning' an iPhone app basically amounts to being in charge of a small potted plant in somebody else's walled garden.
Um... There are over 200,000 iPhone apps, and the entire web. It's also up to 32GB (and 64GB in iPod Touch and iPad variants).
So, "small potted plant in somebody else's walled garden" is rather absurd.
For HTC, Motorola and RIM, #1 is the only way to make profit and they're still doing okay.
Nonsense. Google pays them to install Android (specifically, to include Google-specific features to Android).
Which has nothing to do with whether Apple is fleecing the consumer.
Read the 'fleecing' part and the entire post before rushing to comment?
Yeah, it's not like I went line by line and addressed his whole post or anything...
Unsure indeed. So where are all those hundreds of millions coming from? Straight from AT&T's profits? Or from iPhone users?
I know for a fact that I haven't paid Apple a single cent to stay exclusive to AT&T. I paid AT&T, and they voluntarily paid Apple. As for AT&T, presumably they make more by having more customers than they lose to Apple.
If the app store doesn't make a significant profit then why not open up software installing instead of wasting money on iron clad DRM and multiple TPMs?
Because they want to maintain a certain level of quality of the overall iPhone experience, and it's clearly working out well for them.
How many iPhone users know about how much of their money goes to Apple?
How many care?
AT&T are not fools, they know people buy the iPhone just because others have it and it's shiny and suffer with it even at locations where AT&T service sucks balls and other cell providers' signals are great.
No, they buy it because it's a fucking great phone. They "suffer" AT&T for the phone, not because it's "shiny and peer pressure".
Also, ad hominem much?
Two things:
1. You're a hypocrite to call out my name calling on you when you call iPhone users superficial victims of peer pressure (and the OP called them fools).
2. Ad Hominem is when you use an attack on the person as a means of diminishing their argument. Something like, "you don't bathe therefor your assertion that the sky is blue is false."
I stand by my words.
3) Since you can ONLY use that as a way to get your apps on iPhone,s it's pretty much forced.
Please cite one developer or one user who Apple has forced to buy an iPhone, or buy an app or buy an ADC iPhone membership, etc.
Developer tools don't write themselves, don't provide technical support for themselves, and don't host and provide bandwidth for themselves.
Ummm. This is Slashdot. Ever heard of the GNU toolchain? Even Apple uses big chunks of it, btw.
Oh, right. This is apple.slashdot.org. My mistake.
Apple not only uses it, but they contribute greatly to it (and now moving towards clang and LLVM).
But regardless, are you trying to make the point that GCC writes itself? Or that Apple only provides GCC, and not a full IDE like Xcode, with very well made documentation? That they don't provide multi-gigabyte downloads? That they don't host the software and discussion forums/mailing lists?
I really don't see the point of your posts, other than to publicly parade your ignorance.
For comparison, there are more iPhone OS users than total Linux end-users.
Not for much longer, if Android sales keep growing.
In other words, I'm correct.
Care for some castor oil? It'll make swallowing your words so much easier.
Are you an idiot?
But has the android user shown a willingness to actually buy the apps? IDK, the last data I heard was from last summer and I'm willing to bet that was due to the small installer base. But I haven't heard anything lately.
You can apply for and grab a free copy of Flash Builder if unemployed here:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/free/index.html. It's free of university use too (students & faculty).
http://www.object404.com
You can use completely free and open source tools to create high-quality Flash content. For example, you can use the combo of Sun's JDK, the Free & Open source FlashDevelop IDE (Microsoft .NET 2.0 required) and Adobe's Open Source Flex SDK.
http://www.object404.com
damn your old, I have not seen a new cobol app in years
what a surprise Apple haters mod to oblivion anything that is remotely truthful. glad to see the MS shills are still employed to troll slashdot.
Adobe to Microsoft:
'We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs,' the letter states. 'No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.' !!!
Android market is not the only venue to sell/buy/download Android apps.
Just look at the list here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_distribution_platforms_for_mobile_devices#Third-party_platforms
If an Android developer does not like the Android Market he can use another.
An example of a free App market --> http://slideme.org/
If a author doesn't like a publishing house he can shop for another, even if all are Draconian, there is nothing to prevent someone starting a new one offering better terms for authors.
But, can you point to another App Store for the iPhone? And no, Cydia doesn't count, because Apple believes jailbreaking is criminal and has DRM'ed the iPhone to hell with TPMs to prevent other channels of distribution. I know you won't believe me, so please read http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2008/responses/apple-inc-31.pdf before calling me out on this.
It's just sad how many people make up and believe false rationalizations because of something almost like Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to Apple.
This space for rent.
Sites like Sourceforge hosts downloads for free and you think Apple can't pay for hosting free apps???
Additional bandwidth and storage is dirt cheap these days. Are you living in the early nineties?
There are a lot of sites that use a lot of bandwidth that just run by meager advertising sales alone and you mean to say Apple can't use some of their billions in profits and operating cash to provide those for free for the developers who don't make money off the Apps?
Cmon. Apple has benefited enough from Free software (BSD, Webkit, GCC, etc. etc.) In fact they have made tens of billions off them.
There are hosting plans available for TBs of data for a few bucks a month.
I really don't see the point of your posts, other than to publicly parade your ignorance.
Erm....isn't that what you just did?
This space for rent.
That's about the only move Adobe has left. If they open-source the Flash client, Apple effectively has no argument. They should do it anyway... it's not like they're making shit-tons of money on the (completely free) Flash Player.
I don't know why everyone says that.
/* make it work without all the features */ } else { /* make it work, with the new features */ }
I'm an Android developer. It's trivial to write applications that "runs on all of the devices and takes advantage of the features on newer platforms".
It's as easy as:
if (api level <= 4) {
This may be a flawed analogy, but wouldn't it be akin to a company releasing a car that only ran on diesel? That impedes all the companies that sell only "normal" gasoline. They're stifling competition! If you want to use "normal" gasoline, buy a car that runs on that. If diesel usurps gasoline as the standard fuel of choice, maybe it's because it's better.
Except that, as I understand it, there are good technical reasons why you can't make a car that runs on both diesel and gasoline. There are no such technical restrictions on why you can't run Flash or Flex-compiled programs on the iPhone, as evidenced by the fact that Adobe had the iPhone compiler for Flex working and it's only because Apple changed its SDK terms that you can't use it.
If a manufacturer made a diesel car and artificially prevented it from using gasoline even though many other cars on the market could use either, then it would make perfect sense to complain about it.
Is people acknowledging that Flash is designed as a point-and-click medium, not a touch friendly forest to play in at all! Steve was right when he told people that unless Flash is changed markedly from what it is now (buggy and antiquated and insecure for a lot of reasons) then it will surely face difficult times indeed.
Instead of marketing against apple like this I think Adobe should be spending money to make the product more relevant to the current trends (and ultimate realities) of the way things are going.
This is the same thing MS did with Windows for a number of years and I am happy to see them (at least from what I hear) changing their tune with Win7 but surely everyone remembers the crazy marketing campaign with Vista. All hype and no real improvement or inclusion of what the developers and consumers wanted.
Sites like Sourceforge hosts downloads for free and you think Apple can't pay for hosting free apps???
All I said is that these things don't host themselves. Someone has to do it, and doing it costs money. You have a knack for writing things that agree with exactly what I wrote while pretending that you are proving me wrong.
Additional bandwidth and storage is dirt cheap these days. Are you living in the early nineties?
Dirt cheap != free. In other words, I'm correct.
There are hosting plans available for TBs of data for a few bucks a month.
You vastly underestimate Apple's bandwidth needs.
You also ignore all the rest of the work that goes into Apple's products, including their developer tools.
But the one thing that makes futile your entire argument is that, in the end, this all costs Apple money.
I really don't see the point of your posts, other than to publicly parade your ignorance.
Erm....isn't that what you just did?
Publicly paraded your ignorance? Yes, I suppose I did.
Adobe is calling Apple, Microsoft
Yes perhaps but can you also detect the variation in hardware?
Why bother
In part you didn't comprehend what I wrote, and in part you are just plain wrong. The size of the market for iPhone apps is the total number of apps sold by all app developers. It;s not the number sold by a singe developer, nor is it the number of devices sold.
Actually he did understand what you wrote. What you wrote is wrong.
A "market" for a product is the demand for that product. If Apple never sold a single iPhone, what is the size of the market for iPhone apps? 0. There is no demand for iPhone apps without iPhones.
The size of the market for all smart phone apps is tied to the # of smart phones sold. The more phones that are sold, the more apps you have the potential to sell.
The number of apps sold only matters when determining things like market share, or market penetration.
Thus it's wrong to say that Android sales topping iPhone sales on that study means it's a bigger market. Wrong in several different ways.
It is wrong because it is incomplete. # of phones sold is not the only factor in determining the size of the market, but it is a major player.
n/t
Android developers have to release different versions of their app for different Android phones.
Why is this modded up? Android developers do NOT have to create different versions of apps for different hardware platforms. They do have to take into account different specs, processing power, hardware graphics support, screen size, and a plethora of other factors, but the very core of the Android philosophy is a virtual machine that allows an application to be run on every Android device in circulation.
I imagine however, that the gulf of performance and form factor between the iPhone and iPad is such that alternate versions of apps might be mandated.
No it's not.
Absolutely it is. And for products that are freely available already, such as the smartphones and shoes we've discussed, the demand for the product is the same number as the sales of the product. This is marketing 101 stuff.
Again, absolutely it is under the very definition I gave. Under those circumstances: Sales = 0, Market size = 0.
No it's not. A buyer of a smartphone might buy zero apps, or might buy 100. There's some lose connection between the two markets, but the market for smartphone apps is NOT defined by the number of smartphones sold. You're just plain wrong.
The insight that you are missing is that market share is a proportion of the market, as per my definition. Market penetration is the market size as per my definition related to the POTENTIAL market size.
That's why I mentioned properly-specced yet third-party tires.
Are there really 'CRC police' at the Apple store freaking out about this stuff?
I haven't actually heard of it, just vague scare tactics from Apple.
You can update them back to stock firmware before you take it to the Apple store.
But you don't need to. They can't deny a warranty because of things that plainly don't matter. This has to pass the judge test too, so if they made a battery that burst into flame when the firmware stopped telling it not to, that wouldn't fly. Companies have been trying to lock people in to buying branded replacement parts for centuries.
Like how patent trolls get great success with trivial additions, like "X - on a digital computer" and later "X - over a digital network", Apple is simply adapting old anti-consumer tactics to new technology in the never-ending game of providing as little as possible for as much as possible.
Wetab... hehehe. Giggle. Funny.
An Android tablet that's arguably not available vs a tablet that's shipped a million units in it's first month of availability.
Okay, I'm a borderline Apple fanboi with a serious love/hate relationship with them, but it's pretty obvious what the marketplace wants right now, and it's everything to do with Apple Apple Apple. It's clean, consistent and reliable. And most of all -> HERE.
How many iPhone users know about how much of their money goes to Apple?
How many care? They finally, FINALLY, after 30 fucking years of computer, have a Star-Trek style palmtop computer in their pockets. They don't give a shit who gets their money. As long as they have a device that works, and works well.
That's it. Period.
I don't understand the Apple hate. Have all the Microsoft astroturfers taken up new assignments?
The worst bit is that I can actually imagine that such a workflow MIGHT work...
"We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs" -- except that Adobe support for Linux is abysmal and has always been abysmal (64-bit Flash 10.1??) -- and it has taken them forever to port to Android...
Also ask again about which phones are selling the most when the new iPhone is released in the summer.
Look, Apple isn't arresting development for anyone. You can develop anything you want using any tool you want. Wanna build in Fortran? Go for it. Wanna code in Hypercard? Be my guest. Just don't try to sell it to Apple. The iPad,iPhone, iPod is their game. You don't like the rules? Don't play. Geez, stop your bellyaching and move on. I'm tired of hearing about it!
Why don't they just find a middle ground... create a mobile version of flash, that tailors to all of the shit that Jobs has to complain about? Adobe gets to release a new product (probably going to charge an arm and a leg for it) while Apple makes everyone happy with "Mobile Flash" and continues to boast about something new they are able to do after its been around on other platforms/devices for years? Other than the continuous bitching by both companies, I see nothing that could stop this road from being traveled.
Yes, you can.
How much time does it take to port an iPhone app to Android as compared to writing an entirely new iPhone app?
For a typical app, it would be a complete, grounds-up rewrite - Java isn't Obj-C...
Also, while you do often hear about how properly architectured apps (MVC etc) don't suffer from it, it's all bullshit, too. Vast majority of mobile apps today are UI-centric, that's where the meat is. And the UI models are vastly different between two platforms, so reusability is effectively zero.
It's much better for games, but that's about it.
To me, there is one heckuva difference. Up to a point, at least, Apple should have the right to say what is going to run on the hardware that they support with guarantees that the hardware is going to work.
So, then, why Microsoft shouldn't have the right to say what is going to run on the software they support with guarantees that the software is going to work? What's the difference?
To that small subset of developers who want to develop in Flash (or similar) maybe. But the majority are perfectly happy to use the native ObjC/Cocoa Touch platform.
You have a false "Obj-C vs Flash" dichotomy. This has nothing at all to do about Flash. I've never wrote a single line of code in it, and hopefully never will. But Jobs also prevent me from using the good stuff such as, say, O'Caml or Scala, and that is a travesty.
Hence why I wrote "Flash (or similar)". Because it's not just about preventing Flash, but about preventing any non ObjC/Cocoa Touch platform. It's perfectly understandable that you'd want to be free to use those languages. It's perfectly understandable that Apple wouldn't want the results of that programming to be sold through their App Store. Apple rightly wins the conflict, because it's their store.
It's perfectly understandable that Apple wouldn't want the results of that programming to be sold through their App Store.
What's understandable about it?
To the best of my knowledge, this is, in fact, the first time a company legally restricts what tools can be used to extend its computing platform...
Simple. Software isn't a physical product, and NOBODY guarantees software. Read carefully all the disclaimers that acompany any software.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
See Job's open letter on the subject.
Also see http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331
Personally, I find every point understandable from Apple's point of view.
Possibly. Though of course companies such as Nintendo and Sony retain both complete discretion and secrecy of process over what games are published to their platform. The can prevent publication of software for whatever reason they like, the same as Apple.
Yes, some idiots want to exclude from "number of items sold" the number of items that were sold in countries other than the US. Very funny indeed.
no one is claiming what you say they are.
the iphone is still the most popular. There I said it.
Its also better (and technically superior) than phones like the HTC magic and other Android 1.5/1.6 phones.
However, Android is currently more popular in the US than the iPhone. Deal with it.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
Nuff said. Adobe is full of shit. They hold a comfortable little monopoly on the rich web media market. Seems like Jobs isn't the only one with a reality distortion field.
Boredom is bliss.
On the music front, it is important to remember they publish some of their music without DRM, but I believe they still have quite a lot of it that is not only tied to their service, but to their device ecosystem.
Only music users purchased some time ago that was under the old DRM scheme and they did not pay to upgrade. All music sold on iTunes for some time now is DRM free.
Again, you bring up good points, but I still think both companies are seriously abusing the "FOSS" movement for the sake of marketing themselves as being "more open" when neither are truly open.
I don't think it's marketing though, at least not wholly. Apple has contributed far, far too much to real world open source projects to have the efforts deserve the label of marketing. They didn't have to give back any of the Webkit work they've done (for example). The engineers at Apple, when you talk to them at WWDC, are on a personal level very happy to give back to the community which Apple really heavily depends on. Apple at the heart of things is VERY much a bunch of really technical people, not marketers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why can't you put your PC next to your TV?
I can, but I don't imagine that most of my audience would be willing to do so for two reasons:
asstastic
you heard me, ass tastic a s s tastic