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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.
Isn't that like praising a fundamentalist preacher for stopping his book burning?
They were an early casualty that had to redo their first issue magazine app because of Apple. In the end it was an underwhelming 500MB kludge, and I doubt they recouped the costs that they must have put into that.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/05/27/adobe-rewrites-wired-magazine-ipad-app-without-flash-gets-it-ap/
This is eerily similar to Microsoft being praised for Windows 7 after pushing Vista. Sure the situation is completely different, but praising a company for finally listening to consumers is the wrong way to go about it.
I think this is the first time I've heard "flash support" and "good news" in the same sentence. My, how the times they are a changin'.
I don't know what you're talking about. We've always loved Flash.
In other news, the ministry of truth was working overtime in the last few days for some reason..
This is a troll. This is a troll on 4chan. And this is a troll on Slashdot.
Any questions?
Living With a Nerd
Does anyone remember when "big blue" was the bad locked down company? And then, later, it was Microsoft (their former competitor)? And now it seems to be apple who has these crazy rules in place?
Maybe in the world of tech companies, there always has to be one to pull this kind of shit.
Nice that they post the rejection guidelines, but when will they actually follow them? The WiFi finders that disappeared is one. If Apple thinks that is own wifi locating software in iOS is enough to trump all the quality apps that were out there then that means they could do the same for any app even if the app performs better then the so called existing app. The wifi finders found 10x the networks that the network finder in iOS finds, yet this was enough to have apple take the stupid action of eliminating all wifi finders. An example is Wifi-fo-fum which will find 10 networks, tell you the mac, mode, security protocol channel, rssi and rates as opposed to apple's that tell you subnet and ip, with rssi only given in the form of the signal graphic that is about useless when trying to trouble shot signal strength on a wifi network and what might be affecting it.
After reading the pdf "App Store Review Guidelines" I'm of two minds.
First, damn that's a long list of rejection reasons.
Second, the subset of that list that is neither reasonable nor obvious is very short. There are only a couple that I would say are stupid, and they revolve around censorship (i.e. adult themes).
In the end, would I try to write an app that violated any of those rules? Probably not. One could argue that I might want to... and that's true. But if I want to do that, there's an Android market just over thataway. It's a walled garden, but there's a door right there.
Webkit doesn't disallow plugins, apple does.
meep
I just recently got full and official Flash support on my Motorola Droid with Android 2.2. It seems oddly coincidental to me that as soon as Android has solid Flash support, Apple decides it's time to open the floodgates and be best buddies with Adobe.
What the fuck? Sure, it's natural that Apple would do that because they want to stay competitive with the Android segment of the market, but Apple was supposed to be the leader and "innovator", not the follower.
I guess you still have to pay $99/yr for appstore developer ability, or $299/yr for corporate development.
But what about people that just want to do the coding for themselves or fun? I don't want to distribute my app. Why can't I register one device that I can load my code onto for free without paying either of these?
I have a Mac, iPhone and XCode. Why can't I compile my code and move it onto my device without paying (or jailbreaking).
Seems that would be a nice way to get some more developers in.
Can I get my troll scrambled with cheese?
Publicity 101 for leveraging a strong market position:
....
1) Impose unnecessary and draconian restrictions
2) Lots of anger in community; blog postings / news articles result (read: publicity)
3) Remove unnecessary and draconian restrictions
4) Lots of praise in community; blog postings / news articles result (read: more publicity)
5)
6) Profits!
We've always hated Flash, but we also always valued the Freedom to Suck. Remember, you can't ever do anything cool without sucking in someone's eyes.
GOOD NEWS EVERYONE! Flash can now port applications to the iphone!
No...only spam.
Living With a Nerd
We hate flash, but we hate Apple more. So whenever it's an Apple story, we love flash and hate Apple because they prevent us from using flash, which we hate.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Why would Flash take more battery than a normal app? Is there a suck_battery_life() function somewhere in the API nobody else is using but Adobe?
I don't want flash-based apps on my iOS device. They are slower and use more batteries than non-flash-based equivalent apps.
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
running Flash is processor intensive
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
No, it's a function Flash isn't using: usleep(). ;-)
Basically Flash has a tendency to spin its wheels while waiting a lot more than a normal application. Continually polling for stuff to do is heavy on the processor and consequently is detrimental to battery life.
I think it will be good for everyone involved that the rules are clearer and more app creation tools exist, as long as the approval process is both stringent and non-abusive.
Also glad that Flash applets are not allowed... those are 90% advertisements, and for those useful non-ad content, I'm happy using my desktop to view them.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
why am I a troll now? for expressing my opinions on Flash?
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
any app that has constant animation is processor intensive.
Absolutely none of them are on par with the real flash. It's not possible to re-implement it in HTML5.
True. But the method of porting flash apps to the iphone may introduce differences from how flash is run as an applet. Do you have any evidence that the recompiled flash apps for iPhone have the same issues as flash applets? (Barring of course programmers using explicit busy waits.)
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I saw that with libimobiledevice, it's possible to control your iOS device with your Ubuntu desktop, including doing things like installing apps: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/iPhone
What I'm wondering is, would it now be possible to develop apps for the iPhone from your GNU/Linux desktop, using a free software stack? What I have in mind is something like this: you write the application in C (a strict subset of Objective C), compile it using GCC (targeting ARM architecture?), using headers obtained from the Apple SDK (I suppose GNUStep wouldn't do), and then use libimobiledevice to deploy it to your phone. I suppose this still lacks some important parts, such as a device emulator which can hook back into a debugger, but still I think it's interesting to think about.
Is anyone currently pursuing this kind of work?
As this is still a fairly new development, who knows if the Flash->iOS native inherits the same faults of the original runtime. I would tend to think it's likely that it will, for the following reason. It would be far easier and less prone for porting weirdness for Adobe to build a Flash as static link library and stub launcher that can bind against the data chunk from a source .fla than to completely transcode the .fla into native code.
Not yet a suit, just an investigation. And now, not likely to become one.
It's possible to both hate Flash and realize that a lot of things you want still require it.
(And, possibly, that there isn't a better alternative technology in some cases. I said some cases, HTML5-is-the-answer-to-all-things-video partisans.)
Which feature of Flash is impossible to re-implement? Using the front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 is the only one I can think of, and even that is being worked on and should be quickly resolved in the near future.
Heck, they've even ported Quake to HTML5. That is quite a bit more advanced program than most Flash apps.
what's your point? those non-animated flash web pages / fragments use zero CPU cycles.
So lets see.. first there was "Edge is fine.. 3G is overkill," then "WE HAVE 3G!!" Then it was "nobody needs tethering," "Stop the presses: WE HAVE TETHERING*!!!! (*except in the US)", then "Multitasking is ridonkulous," "Oh, one more thing... WE HAVE MULTITASKING!!!"
And now Flash.
Steve Jobs is such a visionary.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"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.
Flash is a hammer that frequently gets used to nail in screws. But sometimes you actually need a hammer.
The ______ Agenda
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.
“Hello, slashdotters, look at your troll, now back to me, now back at your troll, now back to me. Sadly, your troll isn’t me, but if he stopped using copypasta and old memes and switched to creative shit, he could get modded like he’s me. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re in a basement with the troll your troll could sound like. What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s an key to your own place and a girlfriend. Look again, the girlfriend is now a Beowulf cluster. Anything is possible when your troll is creative and not a lady. I’m on a Android.”
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
There are extremes, and a happy medium... I prefer being happy.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Now we get our native Google Voice app, right? Right?
Oh, this just overturns one previous bad rule, not all of them.
The ______ Agenda
Well, you have to admit that it takes a visionary to make a product that's functionally inferior to everything else on the market, and yet outsell everyone by such a large margin. And then roll out new versions with all those missing features, and sell it to all those poor schmucks who had already bought the original phone again and again!
Flash has a reputation for doing everything (video decoding, etc.) in software even when there is (more efficient) hardware available on the device.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Video overlay is up to the browser, but compositing is certainly possible.
Support is there. Including the ability to generate audio from code. Which lacking feature do you feel is necessary?
If you are talking about the development of the viewer, Javascript can run anything that LLVM can spit out. That includes Objective-C and even ActionScript in the optionally typed language category.
If you are talking about the Flash content itself, why wouldn't you be using ActionScript? There is no reason why a Javascript app cannot interpret it.
You're probably got me on performance, but that does not stop one from implementing said features.
I doubt that. First of all excesive battery use by means of things like busy waits are grounds for rejection, as are failing to follow the HIG.
Assuming the cross compiling system does not use busy waits and polling as much as flash on other platforms do, then there is no battery life issue unless the programmer has added his only busy wait code, which would be indisputable grounds for rejection.
Regular apps would be a pain to implement with flash, since it would require simulating the standard widgets.
But there is one category of applications that is not really expected to follow the HIG, namely games. A large number of games on the iPhone are ports of games implemented in flash on other platforms.
A few I can think of off the top of my head (there are many, many, more though):
5 Minutes to Kill Yourself, Amateur Surgeon, Bloons, Boomshine, Cannabalt, Crush the Castle, FarmVille, Gravity Hook, My Li'l Bastard, Shift, Sushi cat, and Vector Runner.
Furthermore, since PopCap games has Flash versions of many of its games, which may provide an an easier way of porting its games to the iPhone, just adding in the remaining features of the full version as desired for the iPhone and iPad, and possibly tweaking the form factor and controls a bit.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
That's not the hallmark of a visionary, but rather of a salesman.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I actually think supporting the addition of Flash in apps but, now this is key: continuing to not support Flash in Safari -- is actually rather ingenious of Apple.
First off, Apple was smart to ban Flash from App Store apps, initially. This has allowed Apple to build the thriving eco-system of apps, using their native graphics APIs, that exists today. Now, they have lifted said ban, one might be concerned that this means that suddenly a bunch of slow flash-based apps are going to dominate. But, here is the kicker: in order for a flash-based app to be successful it will have to compete favorably against the hordes of non-flash apps, already out there. Personally, all the apps that I use on a daily basis, aside from having all the features I need, are fast, pleasant to use, and just look nice. All the rest simply sit on my last page of the home screen as they approach their fate of being deleted.
By lifting the ban, they have effectively said to Adobe: "Fine, you can submit Flash-based apps. But, just watch what happens." My guess is that there maybe only a handful of flash-based apps will make the cut, if that. And by continuing to not support Flash in Safari, Apple continues applying their pressure on web developers to migrate from Flash to HTML5. Of course, this move could potentially back-fire on Apple, should Adobe figure out a way to optimize flash such that it's performance hit would be insignificant. My former prediction is the more likely scenario. And I'd bet real money that this is exactly what the folks in Cupertino are counting on.
The reality is, the "room" has gotten a bit too hot (with everyone complaining about App Store restrictions, the iPhone 4 Antenna issue, etc.) so Apple made, what I believe to be a very wise decision, to help relieve some of this pressure. It's a calculated risk for sure. But, one that will pay off for them in the end.
Apparently you have underestimated the value of malware. $99 is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money they could make from it.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
We have lots of kids downloading lots of apps, and parental controls don't work unless the parents set them up (many don't). So know that we're keeping an eye out for the kids.
Pathetic excuse ... I already sold my 3G and sure as hell won't buy another Iphone. Next stop: Android city.
no, now we'll just bitch about how "Insecure, power-hungry, inappropriate for touch devices, never ready, outdated" Flash is on the iPhone
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well, good thing the code is converted to native iPhone code since the iPhone still does not run flash.
Running an app that has been ported from flash will be no different than running any other native app that runs with a native abstraction library. ie. Will not use any more battery power than a non-flash equivalent app.
Apple only makes decisions based on user happiness, don't 'cha know?
Last week users would have been unhappy if their apps could be developed in Flash, this week it would please them.
There's NOTHING political going on here. (Well, nothing more than the original ban...)
And yeah, now us Flash haters get our real fun - Adobe will get its chance and blow it because Flash really does suck! I'm going to go get popcorn.
Pretty much exactly.
Well, that and the ban against Flash clearly wasn't just about an actual suck-metric reached, but Job's political decision to punish a troublesome partner.
...you can just make a big opt-out off Flash. Apple has restricted your choice, whether you like this interpretation or not. It's like alcohol: I normally describe myself as a non-drinker, but I'm not a fanatic and I will drink a bit in special occasions (the champagne in my own wedding for example - god it would suck to toast with Diet Coke wouldn't it?). In Apple land, you have the Prohibition. I suppose some Americans (the absolutely radical non-drinker types) were happy with that in the 1920's.
I have a couple points that seem to be lost in this thread. First, this isn't the "Flash" that you know and hate. This is apps written in ActionScript 3 that are compiled into native iOS apps. They aren't necessarily going to be straddled with the same issues the community often complains about.
Second, there is one important aspect of this that no one seems to pay attention to. Adobe's Flash Packager for IPhone and MonoTouch are the only way for someone to develop IPhone software without buying a Apple Macintosh (at least without a Hackintosh, which is of questionable legality). It's always surprised me how few people point out that IPhone development requires a Mac, and that the barrier of entry is (or was) much, much greater than $99 / year for the majority of us.
Not that responding to ACs is a worthwhile endeavour, but see http://www.zeropaid.com/news/89494/ascap-declares-war-on-free-culture/.
Specifically note the group that ASCAP is considering their enemies. Note, among others, Creative Commons. How will you feel when you no longer have the right to distribute stuff you make under the conditions and license you choose?
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
"Maybe he just wanted you guys to shut up and quit your bitching."
That's funny. Steve Jobs never listens to people who bitch. You'll have to come up with a better troll than that to defend Jobs.
"Video overlay is up to the browser, but compositing is certainly possible."
Not really. It's possible to have other items over the "video" tag, but effects like 'fade in' are going to be difficult.
"Support is there. Including the ability to generate audio from code. Which lacking feature do you feel is necessary?"
Not really. There's no programmatic access to live audio stream. There are some proposed extensions: http://ajaxian.com/archives/amazing-audio-sampling-in-javascript-with-firefox but nothing standard so far.
"There is no reason why a Javascript app cannot interpret it. You're probably got me on performance, but that does not stop one from implementing said features."
I'm talking about AS3, it has optional typing to speed up JIT. So far, it works much better than most JavaScript JITs.
1: SVG
Which is a total phail.
There's no real animation support for SVG and its renderers are dog-slow.
You see, vector model of SVG is not really suitable for morphing and keyframe animation. In SVG, pictures are composed of polygons, which are composed of vertices connected by edges.
Suppose that we have a picture of two adjacent triangles (a square with one diagonal).
Then in SVG it will be represented as 4 vertices and 2 triangles composed from these vertices. These triangles are separate and are not dependent on each other.
Flash uses completely different way to represent data: as a plane divided into sections. So to get this picture you start with a plane (frame surface), and divide it into two adjacent areas. The diagonal line is represented not as a line from point A to point B, but as an element dividing two areas.
This gives a lot of advantage, Flash player can easily and smoothly animate scenes. There's no risk of ugly 'hole' effects caused by numerically instable algorithms or incorrect processing of self-intersections.
There is no such thing as a Mac Pro G5. All Mac Pros use Intel CPUs and the G5 is a PowerPC chip. You're probably using a G5 PowerMac. That being said...
Adobe Flash was designed initially for use on Microsoft Windows systems running x86 CPUs. Although it has been ported to other platforms and architectures, its performance is still better on Windows than other OSes and magnitudes better on x86 than other CPUs. I've used Flash on a dual 2GHz G5 PowerMac and I can attest that it runs worse than a 1GHz Pentium III.
The iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad/AppleTV all use an ARM CPU, an ARM Cortex A8 to be more specific which is what the Motorola Droid uses, which means that Flash performance on the Apple iOS devices should be comparable to the Droid's. In other words, I wouldn't get your hopes up.
We've always been at war with Eurasia!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Even if you manage to implement a translator that plays Flash via web kit but is not a "plug in," there is still another obstacle. From Apple's guidelines:
However, there is Cloud Browse which runs Firefox with Flash remotely, and then streams the display to your iPhone.
There is no such thing as a Mac Pro G5.
I'm not a Mac guy (he says, typing on a MacBook). Well, not really. Yeah, you're right, it's a PowerMac or whatever. I know it's a PowerPC G5, and that it's from whatever the Pro line was called before it was a MacPro since it's the same huge honking case. (It's a second-hand work computer, and was at hand at the time.)
I still experience the same CPU usage increase on Intel chips even when displaying a non-animated Flash app, it's just not as drastic. (From about 20% to 35% - but this is under Firefox 4 Beta 5, which hates Flash under Mac OS X. It keeps on declaring it "crashed.")
One other correction from my previous post - I had written "tab open" when I really meant "tab visible." Right now I still have the Lexulous tab open, and Firefox's CPU usage is down to what it would be without the tab open. Whenever Flash is visible, the CPU usage shoots up. I assume it has something to do with the rendering engine animating non-animated things. I dunno. I just know that it happens and is easily reproducible. Then again, I still am not sure why Firefox burns CPU time doing nothing either, but it does, so it's not limited to Flash.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
5) A mature development environment.
6) Tools integration.
7) Mature development pathways with known costs.
5, 6, and 7 will exist eventually, but *really* don't exist right now. Creating a semi complex app (like, say, a college information front-end) in Flash would be far easier, cheaper, and with less unexpected problems than doing it in HTML 5.
The ______ Agenda
Actually, the question is "why does", not "why would".
Actually, the question is "what was the loud wooshing noise going over your head?"
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Re "Support is there. Including the ability to generate audio from code. Which lacking feature do you feel is necessary?"
Want to use your cam to stream video and audio to the web? Any website with video support?
Thats the freedom of flash, vs say 'open' facetime.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
But is the problem with this specific application or with flash? The tower defence game I used to play a little(Gem crafter) newer took much cpu time when nothing happend. But it can take a lot of cpu time when there are lots of monsters on the map.
Remember You can make a busy loop in any language. Doom does that so even standing still in the game will tax your cpu to 100% rendering that nice 640x480 screen again and again.
It would help if people understood what it is that is now allowed on an iPhone. You cannot run Flash on the iPhone, you, however as a developer, now write one Flash (AS3) or Flex app and WILL be able to deploy it as a stand alone application to:
1) iOS
2) Android 2.2
3) RIM
4) Symbian
5) Windows Mobile
6) Meego
7) Palm OS
8) Linux (Desktop App)
9) OSX (Desktop App)
10) Windows (Desktop App)
11) Any browser that supports Flash 10.1
So, yeah, Flash is bloody awful apparently, but the value proposition of one set of code deployed to pretty much everything, is erm...well awesome. The development tool set Adobe (and others) have released for ActionScript 3 are exceptionally good. Flash isn't going away, but people keep bitching about the performance of it within the browser and how all it is used for is messing up your web experience and that is completely missing the point.
Adobe, and I have spoken to the Flex product development team, don't give a damn about web browser support, they want/need Flex to run as a standalone application through Air because that means they can deliver it to the above 10 operating systems.
From a business point of view, Adobe have a development platform that really can't be touched and the clause change Apple announced rightly caused Adobe's stock to rise 15%.
For all those anti-flash people, ActionScript 3 ain't that bad, and Flex is very productive.
Outsell everything on the market? The smartphones that can actually do those things, from RIM or Nokia, have a far greater marketshare than Apple, and even Android is growing faster than the iPhone. Nokia sells more phones per quarter than Apple have ever sold. Silicon Valley is not the world.
Thanks for missing that the joke made much more sense after my change
Erm? Ok. Maybe to you.
Anyway - sorry for the late reply, I didn't even realize you'd replied!
I don't know if you realize, but it is a very hard to see your posts when they're all at -1.
Perhaps if you start being a little less offensive, you'll get some more karma.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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