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Apple Slaps Developers In The Face
- nopal 17y agoAny real developer would not in good conscience be able to support this. I hate such broad-sweeping statements. What is clear is that Apple most definitely would [abuse their loyal users and make them pawns for the sake of trying to hurt another company]. Apple has always been about the experience of using their products, and I think a lot of what they're doing with their mobile devices still stems from that focus. Maybe they're being too heavy handed, but, then again, they're not allowing grandma's phone to be overrun with software that affects the perception of the device itself. Comments disabled as I’m not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots. I also find this highly patronizing.
- pyre 17y ago> they're not allowing grandma's phone to be overrun with software that affects the perception of the device itself. That may be fine if you're 'just producing devices,' but Apple presents the iPhone and the iPad as the 'future of computing' with a vision of all computing being done on devices like this in the future. Therefore the way they treat their devices' ecosystem now should be a predictor of how they see their role in the ecosystem in the future, a future where their devices are the only devices.
- rbanffy 17y ago> Any real developer would not in good conscience be able to support this. > I hate such broad-sweeping statements. I know no "real developer" who really likes Flash either, so, I find all this "oh no we want Flash" thing rather amusing.
- kelnos 17y ago>> Comments disabled as I’m not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots. > I also find this highly patronizing. Patronizing? Sure... Incorrect? Probably not.
- bilbo0s 17y ago"...Personally I will not be giving Apple another cent of my money until there is a leadership change over there." Uhhh What? The Apple Board? Fire Steve Jobs? Yeah, good luck with that buddy.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- sp332 17y agoMore a direction of leadership, not people in leadership. Although a few heads rolling might be therapeutic :-)
- houseabsolute 17y agoI think some people are alluding to the fact that he was knocking on death's door as little as a year ago. Probably most people don't wish him dead, but some certainly wish for the _effects_ of him dead, some of which might be the loosening of tyrannical grip on developers and a decrease in the number of purely emotional decisions (this, banning Google Voice, etc.).
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- bilbo0s 17y agoNo disrespect intended here. But I have to say this. I just think this is starting to get a little morbid. It's better to win in the field of ideas. If you have a better way, go compete. Create a phone or a tablet or a web site or whatever, and build a business. Wishing someone dead so you can leach off of the one they built is a little 'punk-like'. Now again, no disrespect. I'm just sayin'.
- houseabsolute 17y agoJust to be clear, I'm not saying I want him dead or even the effects of that. I'm just speculating that many people probably do. You could not possibly disrespect me by saying anything about those hypothetical people because I do not embrace their position.
- houseabsolute 17y agoI continue to be impressed with the license Adobe gives their official representative. This is not the first unprofessional reaction I've seen on this blog. Yes, it is understandable. Is it wise? Maybe a better worded response could inflame the minds of the abused more effectively and not sound like a temper tantrum.
- smackfu 17y agoThe professional thing is to have your lawyers slip changes into a legal agreement and to make no public statement on it. Which is worse?
- houseabsolute 17y agoFalse dichotomy.
- pyre 17y agoDon't assume that he's presenting Adobe's only alternate course of action. He's taking two different courses of action taken by two different companies and asking the reader to compare them.
- houseabsolute 17y agoThe problem is that his comment is totally irrelevant. Whether what Adobe is doing is better than what Apple is doing has zero bearing on whether it's the best thing for Adobe to do, which is what my comment was about. The rhetorical tactic he was employing was to make it seem as if there are only two options, be Apple or be Adobe as it is in this post. That rhetorical dichotomy is misleading, even if he wasn't making an exclusive logical statement.
- smackfu 17y agoProfessional doesn't equal good, is what I was going for. Professional just means they are smiling when they stab you.
- ROFISH 17y ago"Go screw yourself Apple." How professional.
- jasonlotito 17y agoCompared to Job's statements, or Apple's "God screw yourself developers." I think it's toned down. And after what Apple has pulled, yes.
- mcantor 17y agoI was really shocked at how partisan and flagrantly accusatory this post was. Does Adobe really want this kind of mudslinging associated with their company name?
- jongraehl 17y agoAn honest and justified gripe is fine with me; I even respect people for not being afraid to accuse in such a case, but I guess they should consider people who value decorum higher, as you do.
- kelnos 17y agoSince when is some silly notion of "professionalism" an absolute measure of the worth of what people say? Personally I'd prefer something profanity-laced that I can relate to (as long as it actually presents reasoned arguments!), over some artificial, self-censored PR-speak.
- jherdman 17y agoI'm sorry, but I really don't give a damn. There's a lot of speculation here (and elsewhere), and until I hear anything official from Apple I refuse to get too wound up.
- jackowayed 17y agoYou seriously think that if this were just a misunderstanding, they would let all of this Apple hate grow and grow for over 24 hours? They would have issued a statement clarifying things by the end of business hours yesterday if this "speculation" were wrong.
- jcl 17y agoI'm not so sure. They were content to let the whole iPhone NDA thing fester for months.
- gamache 17y agoWe have something official, more official than any press release: the developer contract. No matter what Apple says in the next few days, nothing short of removing the new clause can prevent Apple from enforcing it at will.
- jherdman 17y agoWell, that's sort of what I'm driving at. Apple clearly has an agenda with this clause and its not 100% clear to the developer community what that agenda is. Do they mean things like PhoneGap are dead, or simply things that provide an alternative API (e.g. running apps via the Adobe Air runtimes). How about cross compilers? Does Apple really give a damn if you write something in Scheme and then have it transcoded into Obj-C? I highly doubt.
- gamache 17y agoMy point is that their agenda, while useful to know, mean nothing in the long run, because as long as that clause is active, Apple has the ability to enforce it capriciously. Whether or not they "mean" things like PhoneGap are dead, etc., is irrelevant. The ability to kill any app because of its original source language is the important thing.
- jluxenberg 17y ago[Sentence regarding Apple's intentions redacted at request from Adobe] did anyone read this before the post was edited?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ilike 17y ago"What is clear is that Apple has timed this purposely to hurt sales of CS5" As many other commenters pointed out here, theflashblog.com is not an official Adobe blog.This is definitely not "Adobe's reaction" as the title suggests.
- cubicle67 17y agoI get the impression he's paid to write things Adobe would like to say, but can't
- philwelch 17y agoIt's not an "official Adobe blog", but what he writes depends upon what Adobe chooses to redact or not. That sounds like a very passive aggressive way for Adobe to tell Apple to screw themselves.
- furyg3 17y agoI find it slightly amusing that these two statements are in adjoining paragraphs: The trouble is that we will never hear their discontent because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted [Sentence regarding Apple's intentions redacted at request from Adobe].
- sosuke 17y agoWe've been down this road before with the HTML5 vs Flash iPad post that Lee Brimelow made. The title is wrong, this is not Adobe's official response this is from an Adobe evangelist.
- tvon 17y agoIt's clearly not their official PR response, but the author obviously speaks as a representative of Adobe.
- tvon 17y agoNote that at this point there are disclaimers above and below the piece that were not initially there.
- simonk 17y agoSorry I can't agree with you a evangelist is an official representative. Its not a personal blog, its all about Adobe.
- Qz 17y agoSomeone should edit the title for this post -- theflashblog.com is not an offical Adobe blog, and the post is simply the reaction of one Adobe employee. This is not the 'official Adobe response'.
- frou_dh 17y agoI think I've been brainwashed because I had immediate involuntary disdain for the guy because it says he's a Flash Evangelist at the top of the page.
- csytan 17y agoThe trouble is that we will never hear their discontent because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted. ... Comments are closed. A little hypocritical don't you think?
- jeiting 17y agoI wish we could all be as open as Adobe. Please do not reply to this. Especially if you do not agree.
- kelnos 17y agoNot really. It's his website, his soapbox. In his position, I wouldn't want to deal with all the unintelligible Apple fanboy posters either -- even at the expense of the likely-few reasonable, well thought-out posts. Publishing on teh intarwebs is cheap and easy. If some potential commenters want their own soapbox, they can easily get one. I honestly don't understand why it's become "required" that readers of any site should be able to comment on what's written on that site. Let the content stand for itself. If you have an opposing viewpoint, use your own channel to promote that viewpoint; don't leech off of someone else's.
- oscardelben 17y agoAre apple employees really forbidden from blogging and posting to social networks?
- j79 17y agoWhat immediately came to mind was http://webkit.org/blog http://webkit.org/blog Of course, they stick pretty much on topic so I'm not sure if they occasionally inject personal opinion...
- apike 17y agoOf course we aren't. Plenty of Apple employees blog about things other than their jobs.
- elpuri 17y agoOf course the question everyone is interested in is are you allowed to publicly comment on / criticize issues like Apple strategy, policies and technologies. So are you?
- apike 17y agoI've never experimented with that boundary. Publicly criticizing your employer is unwise and unprofessional no matter who you work for. I don't imagine there are many Fortune 500 companies where you would last very long doing that.
- elpuri 17y agoYeah of course that's obvious, but is there or is there not a company rule that prohibits employees publicly commenting on company matters like the Adobe guy says? Edit: I just realized that you're not allowed to comment on it if there is one :)
- thebigshane 17y agoRight, so blink once if there exists said rule, twice if not. No response and we'll assume the former. /s
- mdasen 17y agoSo, there are a couple things here that jump to my mind. 1. Adobe isn't completely innocent. They're pretty close to a monopoly on their type of software and charge dearly for it (their Creative Suite costs as much as a MacBook Pro). They've done a lot to make sure there are no non-Adobe Flash players even when that's just hurting customers and not costing them money since they don't sell the player. They're not exactly "open" and "free". 2. Apple could be said to have an interest in not supporting intermediaries. Intermediaries are likely to create less efficient code and I'm sure they don't want to deal with developers using up their support time over things that are the fault of Adobe's Flash SDK or Novell's C# one. 3. It's also in Apple's interest to get people using Objective-C and their toolkit. It brings developers to the Mac by forcing them to buy one. That will have positive externalities in more software for the Mac. It gets developers into the Obj-C camp which means more people with Mac development skills. It means that apps can't be re-compiled for iPhone, Android, and webOS - and that's huge for customer lock-in. We all know how users get attached to their apps and I think it's easy to imagine Adobe building an Android compiler right after the iPhone one got finished. Do I like Apple's stance? No. As a user and a developer, it's bad for me. However, Apple's the market leader and getting people to use their API gives them control and means that app developers will always be ready to use the latest new features they add while building a wall of incompatibility against Android and webOS that will keep users buying iPhones for apps in the way that users bought Windows computers for their apps for ages. Jobs wanted web apps. Developers balked. Web apps would have been cross-platform (at least with Android and webOS). Apple responded to developers and now they've seen their chance to lock users and developers to their system. Adobe isn't known for being open. Given the chance, Adobe seems to wall itself off as much as Apple. Companies tend to go for openness insofar as it's in their interests.
- ilike 17y agoAdobe doesn't restrict the creation of swf players or swf creation tools. Gnash,Swfdec are free open source alternatives to Adobe Flash Player.
- mdasen 17y agoThere is some debate about whether the Adobe/Macromedia Flash EULA can be considered binding, but Gnash developers prefer to avoid the issue by not installing Adobe/Macromedia tools, and thereby not accepting the EULA. We can use tools like Ming to generate Flash testcases, and we rely on the efforts of volunteers to run our testcases on commercial software and report the result. http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/64 http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/64 Other implementations do exist, but Adobe has taken action to hamper those efforts. EDIT: Other people can argue for as long as they like about what is considered hampering, but Adobe isn't exactly free and open with flash.
- hkuo 17y agoI think this person will regret writing this post tomorrow, if not sooner. This is akin to having an emotional reaction to someone's email and returning an immediate flame email, later feeling like a complete jerk. But this is on a much grander scale, writing a blog post as an official representative of an entire company. Very poor taste. Though I'm enjoying the show quite a lot!!!
- jongraehl 17y agoThere probably isn't anything Apple can do to prevent people implementing cross compilers from i{pad,phone}-legal code to other platforms. So this is merely offensive and insulting to programmers, and can't create any lasting competitive advantage.
- Psyonic 17y agoSure there is. I'm not saying they'd go there, but they could make a blanket statement that all i{pad,phone} apps be exclusives, and if they see the app appear in another mobile store, it's gone. Again, I'm not saying they'd go there, but they certainly could.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- hackermom 17y agoQuite possibly the lamest blog post ever from an Adobe employee - and there have been a good deal already. I personally reason entirely with Apple's choice. I understand every bit of it (and it's not just my fervent zeal of dislike for the obese, sluggish behemoth that Flash has become.)
- anon95110 17y agosheesh... while one half of Adobe's brain (the flash-obsessed Macromedia one) is still screaming and flinging mud, the other half already used some of the perfectly Apple-endorsed C/C++ code they've got lying around and build a useful iPad App: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-ideas-1-0-for-ipad/id364617858 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-ideas-1-0-for-ipad/id36... - It's not like they're all about Flash; although it's obviously this guy's job to make it look like it - hence the title of evangelist.
- angstrom 17y agoFunny, I was thinking the same thing. All the huffing and puffing about openness when they list C/C++ among the ordained languages. Have that many people completely divested themselves of the most cross-platform compatible languages there is? I realize they're ugly step sisters, but if you structure the projects right it's not like it's impossible.
- kelnos 17y agoThe language is mostly irrelevant. It's the framework that matters. You can't plop a gtk, MFC, Qt, or whatever app on an iPhone. You drop a UIKit app on the iPhone, and that's it.
- ecq 17y agoApple's prohibition of Flash-built apps in iPhone 4.0 related to multitasking http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/09/apples_prohibition_of_flash_built_apps_in_iphone_4_0_related_to_multitasking.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/09/apples_prohibi... from the article: "if Apple were simply trying to block Adobe from cross-compiling Flash to create iPhone apps, it could have added the changed text to its existing license agreement and spoiled Adobe's CS5 party immediately, rather than just threatening change that appears fated to kick in when Apple delivers iPhone 4.0 in June. The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple's plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app. "[The operating system] can't swap out resources, it can't pause some threads while allowing others to run, it can't selectively notify, etc. Apple needs full access to a properly-compiled app to do the pull off the tricks they are with this new OS," wrote one reader under the name Ktappe."
- sunchild 17y agoMany posters are missing the point here. Apple is heading Adobe off at the pass, so that Flash is not a viable development platform. The fact that the agreement term can be interpreted to prevent umpteen different other cross-platform development environments is only relevant to the extent Apple's agenda includes enforcing the terms against the makers of those environments. Now, assuming Apple is using this language to defeat the expectation that Flash is viable on the iPhone OS, who really loses? I would argue that elimination of Flash is win for everyone but Adobe, but that's my opinion. Even if you like Flash a lot, you can't fault Apple for not accommodating Adobe given the belligerent history between them. I guess I just have a hard time mustering sympathy for Flash developers after years of frustrating, shoddy, inconsistent web experiences with Flash. There are a few exceptions (artists like http://yugop.com/ http://yugop.com/ come to mind, as well as the acceleration of online video) but, overall, Flash has been a nightmare for opinionated web users like myself. Good riddance.
- stcredzero 17y agoPossible business opportunity: Objective-C to Java/Android cross-compiler?
- cubicle67 17y agoThere's a few things you can do in Obj-C that would be pretty hard to do in Java, but... It's not the language, it's the framework. UIKit and friends really are very good; they're the secret sauce of the iPhone OS and I'm not sure Android has anything comparable.
- stcredzero 17y agoThat's actually good news. If iPhone SDK is a superset of Android capabilities and all of the glue/compatibility framework has to be on the Android side, then this further insulates users of the translation kit from punitive actions from Apple. (The framework itself needs to be implemented carefully to avoid Apple's ire. Apple itself may want to implement it, as it would put their Obj-C toolset in the position as the original, and other platforms get the copy.)
- kelnos 17y agoTake a look at Cappuccino. They claim to have reimplmented the Cocoa APIs in Javascript, arguably a language even more restrictive than Java. Java of course is a bit different language-wise than JS or ObjC, to be sure, but I'd imagine you could support a decent subset of UIKit in Java... though the method call syntax would of course be different.
- cmeranda 17y agoI find it ironic that while Brimelow claims: "Any real developer would not in good conscience be able to support this. The trouble is that we will never hear their discontent because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted." it seems unlikely that he's actually able to take his "open culture" much for granted when they've openly censored several parts of his post, as he freely admits.
- Batsu 17y agoI'm going to leave this thought here, because I don't know where else to leave it without a blog. Apple doesn't like Flash (or Adobe, depending on preference). Adobe develops Flash to iPhone compiler. Apple bans anything-to-AppStore apps that aren't "originally written in C/Obj. C" ... * Adobe writes Flash to Canvas/HTML5 Apps ? Apple has nothing to lose from that cornered last step to get onto the iPhone... The internet as a whole doesn't have anything to lose... For once in my life I feel like an Apple fan. It's a shame it only happened under the influence of alcohol. Edit: I feel very dirty all of a sudden.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- raganwald 17y ago"Any developer would not in good conscience be able to support this." Oh? Raganwald seems to be ok with this, especially since he does his iPhone development on the web platform and doesn't need Apple's permission. "Any real developer would not in good conscience be able to support this." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
- mambodog 17y agoHonestly, I still think people writing native code and using the native APIs for a platform like the iPhone is something worth enforcing. On the desktop multiplatform development toolkits consistently fail to deliver a user experience that is seamless and on par with apps built with the native APIs (especially on a platform with different interface conventions and guidelines, ie Mac OS) and for a platform such as the iPhone where resources are not infinite, and the interface is especially important, it just makes sense to enforce people doing things 'properly'. If that knocks out a few decent applications along with all the lazy, rubbish ports then I think that's acceptable. If they're really that amazing, then they probably justify being rewritten natively. One place where I do have issue with this policy is in the case of game engines/middleware (ie. Unity). Due to the complexity and development requirements of game middleware I think an exception, or a more refined policy, is required to allow middleware to give the required 'leg-up' to game developers. Additionally, while Apple has provided an awful lot of what developers need to create great View-based applications for the iPhone with Cocoa Touch (within the constraints what third-party apps are allowed to do, at least), they haven't done so for games. This is understandable, again due to the aforementioned complexity of game engines, but it makes games a special case.
- mambodog 17y agoWhy reply to someone with a reasoned argument when you can just downvote... nice.
- c00p3r 17y agoApple wants developers to develop iPhone's apps and share the profit, instead of flash sites (and share the troubles with crashing crappy plugin). That is clear and obvious.