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Apple's Developer Tools Turnaround 'Great News' For Adobe

cgriffin21 writes "Apple is being praised for loosening of some of the restrictions in its Application Developer Program license agreement that open the door for app developers to work in Flash for the Apple iPhone, iPad and other devices. And no one is happier about the change than Flash-maker Adobe itself. They wrote, 'This is great news for developers and we're hearing from our developer community that Packager apps are already being approved for the App Store. We do want to point out that Apple's restriction on Flash content running in the browser on iOS devices remains in place.'" Apple also received praise from Google over their reversal, which may have been prompted by an FTC probe. Reader Stoubalou adds that Apple shed more light on the app review process by publishing a list of guidelines (PDF) the violation of which may get an app rejected from the App Store.

3 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Re:WiFi by tylersoze · · Score: 5, Informative

    The WiFi API is private that's why those types of apps were rejected. Believe me I know, we had a game based on finding WiFi hotspots we wanted to port from the DS, but didn't because we knew it wouldn't be approved for use of private API's.

    Private API rejections are one of the rejections that actually makes sense. In those cases, you need to argue for Apple to make the particular API public rather than for them accept apps that use private API's that the company has no obligation to maintain compatibility for, so could change at any time, breaking your application.

  2. Re:Flash is not restricted in Safari by Cyberax · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Which feature of Flash is impossible to re-implement?"

    1) High-quality fast vector graphics with morphing and keyframe animation. Nothing in HTML5 is even close (sorry, Canvas is just a toy).

    2) Video overlays and compositing.

    3) Audio (nope, HTML5 doesn't have enough support).

    4) Language with optional typing and fast VM. JS is not yet there.

    "Heck, they've even ported Quake to HTML5 [techcrunch.com]. That is quite a bit more advanced program than most Flash apps."

    Nope, they haven't. They ported it to WebGL which is NOT a part of HTML5 draft standard.

  3. Re:bad news... by _xeno_ · · Score: 4, Informative

    Apparently. Firefox CPU utilization without Lexulous (a non-animated Flash-based Facebook game - shut up, my Mom likes to play it with us) is about 8%-10%. (This is with Twitter and Facebook open which presumably are doing AJAX polling in the background.)

    Throw open Lexulous, and I discover that I'm losing again (bah), and the CPU usage shoots up to 90% as long as that tab is open. With a Flash app that is literally sitting there doing nothing. No animation, no AJAX polling, just showing a Scrabble board.

    So, joke or not, yes, it would appear that somewhere Flash has found the equivalent of suck_battery_life() and has a rather liberal usage policy for it.

    Disclaimer: the computer I'm trying this on is an old Mac Pro G5, so I'd hope modern computers wouldn't be quite as bad, but still, that's pretty horrible.

    --
    You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.