12 ms·

Why Steve Jobs can't stand Adobe

40 points by anderzole 17y ago

hga 17y ago
Hmmm, another detailed and specific list of Apple's discontents with Adobe which pretty much doesn't intersect with this on submitted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102512 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102512
- radley 17y ago
  First sentence: For some absolutely shocking reason some people wonder why the Apple iPad comes without Java and Flash support. Fair to say it's basically a biased rant.
  - hga 17y ago
    Yeah, definitely a rant (there's nothing to be happy about in this situation, unless you think Flash is evil per se (e.g. its not well known cookie system)), but it seems to be backed up with hard facts.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
cookiecaper 17y ago
Once again, every single issue listed in this article would disappear if Adobe freed Flash. I don't know how they can't see the necessity of this. They should do it soon, before serious HTML5 adoption gets underway, if they want Flash to last.
- dreyfiz 17y ago
  Supposedly, the swf specification is already available to anyone who wants to implement it, without restriction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alternatives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alter...
  - dreyfiz 17y ago
    Wil Shipley (the Delicious Monster guy, formerly of the Omni Group) tweeted that they wrote their own Flash player for Rhapsody, and it wasn't hard: http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/8404153085 http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/8404153085
    - freetard 17y ago
      I doubt it was full featured, given how huge is the spec and how many technologies it embeds especially nowadays (video streaming, p2p etc).
      - hga 17y ago
        And doesn't the video streaming include payments to e.g. the H.264 rights holders? Freeing the whole thing still wouldn't give others the right to distribute it with those codecs.
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    Right, but that doesn't really help. See http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/134378 http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/134378 . Adobe's release of the spec followed by their removal of license restrictions from it was a PR move; if not, Gnash and swfdec would be a lot farther than they are. They are still incompatible with a large percentage of recent (like, last five years recent) Flash content. For Flash to really be open, Adobe has to open all of its associated technologies and they have to provide a decent reference implementation. The most obvious path to this is opening the Flash Player blob.
- plorkyeran 17y ago
  How would freeing Flash do anything to fix the problems with Creative Suite?
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    Ugh, I forgot about that one, and didn't see it when I went back over to verify my statement. It won't fix the stagnant user interface issue, but it might fix problems with the slowness since new versions of CS use Flash even for UI widgets, so if can you can set it up such that CS uses a faster Flash Player, then you can get better performance.
- freetard 17y ago
  They will free it, once it's too late and no one cares. Kind of like Java.
  - Niten 17y ago
    In what world does nobody care about Java?
    - Tichy 17y ago
      Nobody cares for Java in the same sense that Microsoft is dead.
      - tl 17y ago
        Nobody apparently include the growing mass of Scala and Clojure developers.
- radley 17y ago
  Just as reasonable to think this would be solved if Apple opened up the iPhone platform to Flash.
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    Well, the difference is that iPhone OS is only meant to run a few specific Apple devices. Flash is so integral now that to stay alive it must be able to run on anything that loads web pages. As such, it makes much more sense to open up Flash. Even if Apple opened iPhone OS, that would only solve the problem for Apple's devices (assuming Adobe acted upon the openness, though I don't see any reason why they would or why they don't have enough info to create it now), and everyone else's beefs with Flash would still exist.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
pavs 17y ago
How about the fact that Flash (besides having performance issues) would more or less end the reason of having an app store and apple's one large source of revenue? Do you think if iphone had flash, developers would go through the trouble of app betting process by apple? Every streaming music service, video service and flash games and applications would make Appstore irrelevant. That, in my opinion, is the single biggest reason why we will _never_ see flash support in iphone of ipad no matter how fast and secure flash becomes in the near future. Not that I care about flash in mobile device. But, using performance as the main reason for not supporting flash is silly. It can be one of the several reasons, but definitely not the main reason.
- robryan 17y ago
  I think the app store would still be a big thing because it would still be the easiest distribution channel. Even if there was good flash support, there would still be the issue of developers trying to extract revenue from there apps. The app stores give people easy access and instills a quick impulse buy mentality which would be hard for someone developing for the iphone independent of the app store to achieve. Performance for some graphics intensive apps I'd imagine would never be as good just because no matter how efficient flash becomes it would still be an extra layer things are being ran on.
  - pavs 17y ago
    App store would still be a relevant thing _now_ if apple were to allow flash. Simply because users have been accustomed to the concept of app store. An iphone without an app store wouldn't make sense. But, if iphone had flash the first time it was released, I honestly believe it would make app store irrelevant or at the very least it would make some serious dent in to app store revenue.
- philwelch 17y ago
  Apple's three large sources of revenue are selling Macs, selling iPods, and selling iPhones. Everything else--from music to TV shows to movies to iPhone apps--is a complementary product rather than a major revenue driver for Apple.
guelo 17y ago
The part about Adobe being slow to fix bugs had me laughing, I've seen apple take years to fix obvious annoying bugs that had developers banging their heads against their desks. Apple is so annoying to work with with their insane secrecy and arrogance, if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX and talk Microsoft into pulling their Windows licenses for Parallels.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why you're not Adobe.
  - statictype 17y ago
    It's not a completely outrageous point. There is a not-insignificant group of Apple customers who are using their Macs for design purposes with Photoshop being their primary tool. If Photoshop ceased to be available on the Mac (or performed below standard) then which is more likely? They find some other tool? Or switch to an Operating System which lets them run their tool of choice? For casual photo editing, you would probably try a different tool. For professionals who live in Photoshop, they'll probably just switch to Windows.
    - wvenable 17y ago
      If Photoshop ceased to exist for the Mac, that's a huge opportunity for a 3rd party developer or Apple themselves to fill the gap. While most Mac OS users can now simply boot into Windows, I'm sure they wouldn't all be happy about it.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        You buy your hardware because it runs your software, not the other way around.
      - statictype 17y ago
        Professional designers will switch to whatever platform Photoshop runs in. For many of them, the reason they run mac in the first place is because it has better support for their design tools.
rodyancy 17y ago
I would love Apple to create a Photoshop competitor. As powerful as Photoshop is, there is a ton of room for simplification. You know there is a problem when software provides five different ways to perform a task, yet users have to have 5 years experience, or Google, to remember how to implement it.
- oneplusone 17y ago
  Being able to do things using different approaches is one of the best features of Photoshop. It makes the application incredibly powerful.
  - wvenable 17y ago
    Yes, but does Photoshop need 9 different ugly sliders, for example? http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-photoshop-cs4 http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-p...
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      You could turn that argument upside-down and say that it's quite incredible they'd go so far as to create 9 custom sliders depending on the sub-part of the application you're looking at. You can't really argue that all those fit the 'standard' mac slider concept. I think some of them could be rolled together but without knowing more about the context in which each and every one of those sliders gets used it is hard to be even sure about that. Complex user interfaces: http://www.sternstudio.com/HollandsGlorie.jpg http://www.sternstudio.com/HollandsGlorie.jpg Tend to have a lot of buttons & sliders...
      - baguasquirrel 17y ago
        Yes, but there is similarity between the sliders in that picture you show here. When you make 9 different sliders, it distracts from the settings being modified, and directs attention towards the UI itself. This is probably one of the oldest no-nos in traditional design. In the original example, the Color Balance and Layer Blending tools clearly should have been drawn from the same mold. Ditto for Brightness, Pencil Width, Blur Width, Layer Style: Scale.
GeneralMaximus 17y ago
Flash is doomed. I'm more interested in what would happen if Apple did write a Photoshop competitor.
tszming 17y ago
looks like MSFT would benefit from conflicts between apple/adobe, apple/google etc.
Tichy 17y ago
Still, for the longest time the main target demography of Mac users were designers who were primarily using Photoshop. Maybe Apple should present their Photoshop replacement asap.
- jwhite 17y ago
  Or perhaps the relationship is more complex than that. Despite his antics, Steve Ballmer was right about developers. Apple might be irritated by Adobe over some issues, but I don't think they would want to cut Photoshop's lunch like that.

40 points by anderzole 17y ago

hga 17y ago

Hmmm, another detailed and specific list of Apple's discontents with Adobe which pretty much doesn't intersect with this on submitted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102512 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102512

radley 17y ago
First sentence: For some absolutely shocking reason some people wonder why the Apple iPad comes without Java and Flash support. Fair to say it's basically a biased rant.
- hga 17y ago
  Yeah, definitely a rant (there's nothing to be happy about in this situation, unless you think Flash is evil per se (e.g. its not well known cookie system)), but it seems to be backed up with hard facts.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

cookiecaper 17y ago

Once again, every single issue listed in this article would disappear if Adobe freed Flash. I don't know how they can't see the necessity of this. They should do it soon, before serious HTML5 adoption gets underway, if they want Flash to last.

dreyfiz 17y ago
Supposedly, the swf specification is already available to anyone who wants to implement it, without restriction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alternatives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alter...
- dreyfiz 17y ago
  Wil Shipley (the Delicious Monster guy, formerly of the Omni Group) tweeted that they wrote their own Flash player for Rhapsody, and it wasn't hard: http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/8404153085 http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/8404153085
  - freetard 17y ago
    I doubt it was full featured, given how huge is the spec and how many technologies it embeds especially nowadays (video streaming, p2p etc).
    - hga 17y ago
      And doesn't the video streaming include payments to e.g. the H.264 rights holders? Freeing the whole thing still wouldn't give others the right to distribute it with those codecs.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  Right, but that doesn't really help. See http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/134378 http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/134378 . Adobe's release of the spec followed by their removal of license restrictions from it was a PR move; if not, Gnash and swfdec would be a lot farther than they are. They are still incompatible with a large percentage of recent (like, last five years recent) Flash content. For Flash to really be open, Adobe has to open all of its associated technologies and they have to provide a decent reference implementation. The most obvious path to this is opening the Flash Player blob.
plorkyeran 17y ago
How would freeing Flash do anything to fix the problems with Creative Suite?
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  Ugh, I forgot about that one, and didn't see it when I went back over to verify my statement. It won't fix the stagnant user interface issue, but it might fix problems with the slowness since new versions of CS use Flash even for UI widgets, so if can you can set it up such that CS uses a faster Flash Player, then you can get better performance.
freetard 17y ago
They will free it, once it's too late and no one cares. Kind of like Java.
- Niten 17y ago
  In what world does nobody care about Java?
  - Tichy 17y ago
    Nobody cares for Java in the same sense that Microsoft is dead.
    - tl 17y ago
      Nobody apparently include the growing mass of Scala and Clojure developers.
radley 17y ago
Just as reasonable to think this would be solved if Apple opened up the iPhone platform to Flash.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  Well, the difference is that iPhone OS is only meant to run a few specific Apple devices. Flash is so integral now that to stay alive it must be able to run on anything that loads web pages. As such, it makes much more sense to open up Flash. Even if Apple opened iPhone OS, that would only solve the problem for Apple's devices (assuming Adobe acted upon the openness, though I don't see any reason why they would or why they don't have enough info to create it now), and everyone else's beefs with Flash would still exist.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

pavs 17y ago

How about the fact that Flash (besides having performance issues) would more or less end the reason of having an app store and apple's one large source of revenue? Do you think if iphone had flash, developers would go through the trouble of app betting process by apple? Every streaming music service, video service and flash games and applications would make Appstore irrelevant. That, in my opinion, is the single biggest reason why we will _never_ see flash support in iphone of ipad no matter how fast and secure flash becomes in the near future. Not that I care about flash in mobile device. But, using performance as the main reason for not supporting flash is silly. It can be one of the several reasons, but definitely not the main reason.

robryan 17y ago
I think the app store would still be a big thing because it would still be the easiest distribution channel. Even if there was good flash support, there would still be the issue of developers trying to extract revenue from there apps. The app stores give people easy access and instills a quick impulse buy mentality which would be hard for someone developing for the iphone independent of the app store to achieve. Performance for some graphics intensive apps I'd imagine would never be as good just because no matter how efficient flash becomes it would still be an extra layer things are being ran on.
- pavs 17y ago
  App store would still be a relevant thing _now_ if apple were to allow flash. Simply because users have been accustomed to the concept of app store. An iphone without an app store wouldn't make sense. But, if iphone had flash the first time it was released, I honestly believe it would make app store irrelevant or at the very least it would make some serious dent in to app store revenue.
philwelch 17y ago
Apple's three large sources of revenue are selling Macs, selling iPods, and selling iPhones. Everything else--from music to TV shows to movies to iPhone apps--is a complementary product rather than a major revenue driver for Apple.

guelo 17y ago

The part about Adobe being slow to fix bugs had me laughing, I've seen apple take years to fix obvious annoying bugs that had developers banging their heads against their desks. Apple is so annoying to work with with their insane secrecy and arrogance, if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX and talk Microsoft into pulling their Windows licenses for Parallels.

ryanwaggoner 17y ago
if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why you're not Adobe.
- statictype 17y ago
  It's not a completely outrageous point. There is a not-insignificant group of Apple customers who are using their Macs for design purposes with Photoshop being their primary tool. If Photoshop ceased to be available on the Mac (or performed below standard) then which is more likely? They find some other tool? Or switch to an Operating System which lets them run their tool of choice? For casual photo editing, you would probably try a different tool. For professionals who live in Photoshop, they'll probably just switch to Windows.
  - wvenable 17y ago
    If Photoshop ceased to exist for the Mac, that's a huge opportunity for a 3rd party developer or Apple themselves to fill the gap. While most Mac OS users can now simply boot into Windows, I'm sure they wouldn't all be happy about it.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      You buy your hardware because it runs your software, not the other way around.
    - statictype 17y ago
      Professional designers will switch to whatever platform Photoshop runs in. For many of them, the reason they run mac in the first place is because it has better support for their design tools.

rodyancy 17y ago

I would love Apple to create a Photoshop competitor. As powerful as Photoshop is, there is a ton of room for simplification. You know there is a problem when software provides five different ways to perform a task, yet users have to have 5 years experience, or Google, to remember how to implement it.

oneplusone 17y ago
Being able to do things using different approaches is one of the best features of Photoshop. It makes the application incredibly powerful.
- wvenable 17y ago
  Yes, but does Photoshop need 9 different ugly sliders, for example? http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-photoshop-cs4 http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-p...
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    You could turn that argument upside-down and say that it's quite incredible they'd go so far as to create 9 custom sliders depending on the sub-part of the application you're looking at. You can't really argue that all those fit the 'standard' mac slider concept. I think some of them could be rolled together but without knowing more about the context in which each and every one of those sliders gets used it is hard to be even sure about that. Complex user interfaces: http://www.sternstudio.com/HollandsGlorie.jpg http://www.sternstudio.com/HollandsGlorie.jpg Tend to have a lot of buttons & sliders...
    - baguasquirrel 17y ago
      Yes, but there is similarity between the sliders in that picture you show here. When you make 9 different sliders, it distracts from the settings being modified, and directs attention towards the UI itself. This is probably one of the oldest no-nos in traditional design. In the original example, the Color Balance and Layer Blending tools clearly should have been drawn from the same mold. Ditto for Brightness, Pencil Width, Blur Width, Layer Style: Scale.

GeneralMaximus 17y ago

Flash is doomed. I'm more interested in what would happen if Apple did write a Photoshop competitor.

tszming 17y ago

looks like MSFT would benefit from conflicts between apple/adobe, apple/google etc.

Tichy 17y ago

Still, for the longest time the main target demography of Mac users were designers who were primarily using Photoshop. Maybe Apple should present their Photoshop replacement asap.

jwhite 17y ago
Or perhaps the relationship is more complex than that. Despite his antics, Steve Ballmer was right about developers. Apple might be irritated by Adobe over some issues, but I don't think they would want to cut Photoshop's lunch like that.