14 ms·

Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself

154 points by larryrubin 17y ago

larryrubin 17y ago
The plot thickens...
bilbo0s 17y ago
You know I think Steve Jobs maybe is doing the right thing for Apple by not allowing all of these cross compilers. I mean, that article really gave me a look at the history that Jobs is talking about when he says these cross-compiler vendors never support Apple as a first class citizen. I don't LIKE it. But I have a better understanding for it now. Adobe, obviously, always wants to target windows first. Companies like Unity and MonoTouch obviously are more in the C# and even .Net camp. These guys are targeting iPhone as an afterthought. And while we know their products do not run well on macs at the moment, I used to think that they would run well on macs in the future. I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe Apple does need to go it alone with respect to middleware. Even better, some enterprising start up could make an Objective-C game engine.
- barrkel 17y ago
  He's not outlawing cross compilers. He's outlawing innovation in third party tools and frameworks on the iPhone platform. The clause is much more broad than cross compilation.
  - ecq 17y ago
    it's his platform, it's his rules. you don't like it, Android's probably for you.
  - chancho 17y ago
    So it's impossible to write an innovative tool or framework in C, Objective-C, C++ or Javascript?
    - barrkel 17y ago
      It's impossible to innovate except in those areas - all those languages, as implemented on the iPhone, have significant drawbacks, which shouldn't need to be explained to anyone with any history of programming in multiple languages.
      - chancho 17y ago
        Yeah of course, but languages which compile to C also have (huge, IMO) drawbacks, especially with regards to debugging and profiling, things that have a profound effect on the end user experience. I'm not trying to defend the restriction or anything. It's Jobs' right to pull this shit and its everyone else's right to move to Android. I just think it's less about innovation in tools and frameworks and more about keeping the platform isolated for business reasons. This is just an extension of the "no interpreters" rule, which more severely (IMO) hampers language and tool innovation.
        eru 17y ago
        There are native compilers for languages other than C.
        jpcx01 17y ago
        I dont get why people bring this up. It's Apple's right to .... Of course its Apple's right. I don't think anyone's advocating lawsuits. But it's our right to bitch, moan, complain, and try to convince everyone in the world that if Apple doesn't reverse course in due time, they should be attacked with an avalanche of internet mudslinging that will make Microsoft look like Ghandi in comparison. Apple of all companies knows the value of the tech and online community to their bottom line. I think its worth utilizing that to respond to their decisions and somehow influence them to move in the right direction.
  - bilbo0s 17y ago
    Not really. An innovative person could make an Objective-C game engine, or a C++ game engine or what have you. The language does not disallow innovation in frameworks or third party tools, it opens up a new avenue for that innovation. Now mind you I don't agree with the path they have taken. But I do think it is important right now for cooler heads to prevail. Making statements like 'Apple is outlawing innovation...' is not contributing in a constructive fashion to the solution search. What are Apple's concerns? Are they legitimate? How can the developer community address Apple's concerns? If Apple sees not only real effort, but real progress towards addressing those concerns, perhaps it might be willing to loosen up on the reigns. As it stands though, the concerns Apple has are legitimate. Now that we know what they are, can we move towards addressing them. I just think that staking out these strident positions makes for good blog reading, but it is not going to solve anything. If we put our 'crowdsourced' heads together we can come up with a solution that could allow the situation to develop with positive impact with respect to everyone's interests.
    - watty 17y ago
      But I don't see the "quality" concerns that Jobs sees. Do you? Do you think it could be an excuse to maintain control over the development process and to hurt the Adobe CS5 release? They have a review process which is used for quality control yet they allow 60+ fart apps in the store! Why don't they tighten the review process on ALL apps (including non Objective-C apps)? I guess you could say it would cost more to hire reviewers but the money made on the new app sales would certainly cover that (and much more). To me it's just a huge slap in the face to end users who will miss out on much app potential (assuming the reviewers did their job) and to developers who have dedicated time in learning a 3rd party framework - yet so many people here and other places seem to love it.
- chime 17y ago
  > these cross-compiler vendors never support Apple as a first class citizen. Apps should be judged on their own merits, not based on the original language they were coded in.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    That logic terminates in a place that disallows any company from making any business decision ever that might negatively impact any class of developer.
    - enjo 17y ago
      I don't get this. I'm assuming most of the folks here are in development in one form or another, and very few of them work for Apple. Therefore, it is in everyone's collective best interest to have as many free and open platforms as possible. What Apple is doing is attempting to leverage their current success into future success by cutting off an avenue for cross platform authoring. This isn't about users. It's not about quality. It's about savvy developers (that's us) looking for ways to support multiple mobile platforms as painlessly (and profitably) as possible. That's not in Apple's best interest, but it sure as hell is in mine. This isn't a legal question (yet), but as a developer this pisses me off. It should piss you off too.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      - tptacek 17y ago
        It doesn't piss me off, because I think it has more to do with the quality of the platform, and I don't think Apple owes anyone a cross-platform dev environment.
    - statictype 17y ago
      Let's say you hired 2 developers from Albania. Let's say it didn't pan out. Would you change your interview process to ban all developers from Albania? Or would you change your interview process to weed out low-quality candidates? Forget about the legal and moral issues. Which argument makes more sense?
- necrecious 17y ago
  Exactly, I find all this outrage online to be a pointless exercise. A better usage of time is to write a cross-platform Objective-C based game engine. http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/04/09/section-3-3-1-is-good-news-to-native-iphone-developers/ http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/04/09/section-...
- mrkurt 17y ago
  MonoTouch doesn't target anything but the iPhone OS. It's hardly an afterthought. Titanium targets both the iPhone OS and Android, but it's pretty clearly aimed primarily at the iPhone. The Lua stuff Tapulous uses in their games is targeted only at the iPhone OS. Nintendo of all people is happy to let game devs build stuff with Unity. The trend continues, really. I have no idea how crappy the apps are that the Adobe stuff produces, but I do know that these other toolkits are (a) extremely useful and (b) now off limits if I want to do anything on the iPhone. I suspect that if you dug through what's there, the Unity/MonoTouch stuff would prove to be of a higher average quality than the straight ObjC apps. People who look around and choose toolkits like this are generally pretty smart.
- Hexstream 17y ago
  "Even better, some enterprising start up could make an Objective-C game engine." Isn't a game engine a bit like some sort of interpreter (which are banned on the iPhone)?...
  - xsmasher 17y ago
    No, a game engine could be a collection of classes or functions that perform common game-related tasks; like a library. There's no reason it needs to include an interpreter, alhough using a scripting language for some parts like AI and level triggers is convenient.
pistoriusp 17y ago
This explains my disdain for almost everything Adobe on OS X. It's not just that Flash sucks on my Mac. It's that almost all their products suck... They're not focused on OS X. And I'm not the only person: http://dearadobe.com/top_rated.php http://dearadobe.com/top_rated.php
- cmelbye 17y ago
  Reading the Acrobat Reader gripes makes me appreciate having a wonderful, lean PDF viewer (Preview.app) built into the operating system, and it actually fits the look and feel of the rest of the OS unlike Acrobat.
- barrkel 17y ago
  Change the framing of this for a second. Suppose instead of Apple, it was the government deciding which apps get approved, and which don't. Would you support the government to make the correct decisions, by fiat? Or would you rather a free market see opportunities in crappy applications, and produce better alternatives?
  - asimjalis 17y ago
    The free market allows Apple the freedom to limit who can enter their app store, just as it allows me the freedom to limit which apps I approve of and buy.
  - gabrielroth 17y ago
    Boy, that's a terrible analogy. What we're beginning to see in smartphones is a competition between different business models: one (Apple) that exercises a lot of control over the platform, and another (Android) that exercises very little control. We'll get to see how that plays out. That's the free market for you.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      And in a similar way, everybody has freedom of government, because they can just move to another country, right? Except it's often not that simple. People can be locked in in lots of different ways, and suffer at the hands of a dictator, one way or another.
barrkel 17y ago
This article is, frankly, childish. Apple was a fading platform when Adobe made that decision, and it made perfect business sense. Until about 2008, the last time I had even seen a Mac on this (Eastern) side of the Atlantic was about 1991 or so.
- Asa-Nisse 17y ago
  The point is that flash is a fading technology now... in a few years HTML5 will replace it for video purposes. The iPhone is a better gaming plattform. What if Apple released a similar technology to run Obj-C applications in the browser (think of the market for the already developed games to the iPhone)
  - pan69 17y ago
    "What if Apple released a similar technology to run Obj-C applications in the browser" Like Mircosoft tried to with with ActiveX? I don't think so...
    - watty 17y ago
      After what we've seen lately it seems that many Apple users WOULD love it. The end users are the ones here getting hurt by these grudges - why can't they see it? There are great Unity3D, Appcelerator, and Flash apps that will never be made on the App store. How does that not bother you as an end user?
    - heresy 17y ago
      Heard of Google NaCl? Yeah. Native code in a browser without the security implications.
      - tedunangst 17y ago
        And without all that pesky portability either.
  - andrewvc 17y ago
n8agrin 17y ago
Somehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time. I don't 100% agree with Apple's decision to ban non-native language apps, nor do I 100% disdain Adobe (Lightroom is a phenomenal product IMHO). But my dislike of Flash, the now comical number of bloggers jumping on the "Apple is evil, look at their SDK" bandwagon, and this statement all together made me laugh.
csomar 17y ago
My opinion is that Apple is trying to make its platform as closed as possible. Like that people who want to develop for iPad, needs to buy a Mac, use Apple software development tools, use Apple browser... and Apple takes care of distribution and other things. This is exactly like working for Apple as an employee, but instead of getting paid a fixed salary, you get paid as much as you work and as much as your product sells. So you now know the rules. Either accept and work for Apple, or look for another more open platform (and there are opportunities with Windows Mobile, Symbian, Maemo, Android...) For those who think Apple is in War with Adobe, I highly doubt it. Adobe can shut down their CS suit for Mac. So I just think it's a track and a culture, Apple is taking and working on. If you like it, work with them. If you don't, there are other options in the market; if you don't find anything that suits you in this world, so build a nice world of your own.
- sunchild 17y ago
  It's pretty clear that Apple is maneuvering to ensure that CS5 is not must-have software for Mac users. If you want to see an example of a vendor closing ranks to the detriment of users, look no further than Adobe.
adelevie 17y ago
I read posts mentioning "crappy [Flash] ports" to obj-c and protecting "customers from [Adobe's] shitty product". If the port is crappy, then reject it for being crappy, don't reject it because of the tools used to build it.
radley 17y ago
What a tool. It's a shame this made it to Techmeme. He really had to twist the facts to make his point. Here's what he didn't say: ZDNet 2001 (Dec 2001) Article is actually Adobe: OS X's new best friend? "Analysts and creative professionals say that Adobe's release of products for OS X could be the most significant turning point in the new operating system's adoption." "Developers privately complained of stability issues with the original release of OS X, saying that these problems hampered their efforts to move their products to the new operating system. That finally changed in September, when Apple issued the Mac OS X 10.1 update." A slice from 2002 Article is from March '02: OSX 10.2.1 was established as default OS on Macs only 3 months prior! What he left out: "Adobe is actively working to add support for the full version of Acrobat 5.0 running in OS X native mode." "Adobe currently plans to offer native support for OS X in the next major release of After Effects." etc. CNet 2004 "At the same time, Apple has quietly pushed Adobe out of a few markets by selling its own applications or bundling them into its OS X operating system. " John Nack, 2006 (Feb '06) No Intel OS X updated Adobe apps till 07 "Ever since Apple's Intel announcement last summer, they've told the industry (at least the consumer side) that Intel Macs would appear by summer 2006." Wikipedia: "On January 10, 2006, the new MacBook Pro and iMac became the first Apple computers to use Intel's Core Duo CPU. By August 7, 2006 Apple had transitioned the entire Mac product line to Intel chips, over 1 year sooner than announced."
- mtarnovan 17y ago
  He has a point, although the way he arrives at the conclusion is flawed. Adobe made a rational business decision at a time when nobody could have predicted the Apple renascence. This decision might cost them dearly now, but that doesn't mean that given the facts known at that time, they should have made a different one.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
hristov 17y ago
I was wondering how Apple PR would handle this issue, and they are being very clever. They try to frame this purely as a spat between Apple and Adobe. And lets face it, nobody really likes Adobe nowadays because of various issues about cross-compatibility of Flash and their attempts to kill HTML 5. So of course Apple is confident that once the issue is framed as a spat between Apple and Adobe most developers would go on Apple's side. But is that really the main issue? If you think about it, the controversial section of the agreement affects much more important issues that Adobe and flash.
noamsml 17y ago
What sort of fucking joke is this? Saying that some sort of karma game should determine developers' freedom to use the tools necessary for the job? That not supporting a certain platform merits an artificial limitation on the platform? Please.
raysinbran 17y ago
Bingo. Apple doesn't ever want to find itself in a position where it has to depend on 3rd party tools keeping up with its OS evolution. If/when Android ends up being the dominant mobile platform, every dev house will likely make a "business decision" to use cross-platform tools. The control point for app innovation would then be in third party hands. And as for losing out on innovation because developers can't make their own tools, I'm sure Apple isn't worried about that at all. They seem to have enough in-house innovation to run circles around what the competition has to offer, for the past ten years.
wrinklz 17y ago
Finally a balanced analysis of the iPad developer agreement. Screw you, Adobe!
iamelgringo 17y ago
Wow, what a dramatic re-interpretation of events. I was using Macs primarily for graphics work in the late 90's and early 00's. The close relationship between Adobe and Apple was the reason to be on the platform then. Graphic designers and creatives were one of the few markets that Apple had left. Believe it or not, but Apple owes a large part of it's existence through the 90's to Adobe's support of their platform. In fact, Apple and Adobe signed an exclusive deal to only ship Photoshop on Mac's in the early years. Steve Jobs left, the company floundered and almost went belly up. They sued Microsoft for patent infringement, and Microsoft settled by investing $150 million in Apple, and becoming one of Apple's largest shareholders at the time. That helped Apple survive, and it gave Microsoft a reasonable competitor, so it wouldn't have to fight as many charges of being monopolistic. Ever wonder why so much Apple advertising punches Microsoft, but Microsoft doesn't really punch back? So, with the second coming of Steve Jobs and a fresh infusion of cash from Microsoft. Apple decided to completely rewite their code base from scratch based on what he had been doing at Next. OS9 died, and OSX was born. And, while those were great moves for Apple as a company, Adobe was faced with a very difficult choice: whether or not to port millions of lines of code over to a new OS that represented less than 3% of the computing market. Apple was making a "bet the farm" move, and expected Adobe to come along for the ride. Then Apple was pissed because Adobe didn't jump on the band wagon immediately and pony up the millions of dollars it would have cost to port their entire suite of apps to the new OS. Three years after the launch of OSX, Apple made another "Bet the farm" move, and decided to migrate OSX from PowerPC chips to Intel processors. Again, not only did Apple expect Adobe and the rest of their developer ecosystem to port their applications to a new OS, but 3 years after the new OS launched, they expected another dramatic round of rewrites to accommodate Apple's business and technical decisions. But, Adobe did begin porting their software, and in the middle of all those changes, Apple chose to start competing directly with Adobe by launching Final Cut Pro at roughly the same time that Adobe was launching Premiere Pro. A year or two following that, Apple purchased Shake a video compositing app that directly competed with After Effects. Needless to say, relations have been a bit strained between the companies for the last 10 years. As far as I've been able to tell, Apple makes decisions that help Apple. They tend to have a "love us or leave us" approach to their developer ecosystem. Microsoft used to play hardball like that all the time with their developers and with companies that ran on their platform. But they got slapped with anti-trust lawsuits. They play much nicer with other kids than Apple does these days. The only reason that Apple can get away with this, is because they are still seen as the "under dog" by many. I suspect that perception might be changing. It's been so strange to hear a lot of arguments coming from Apple fans that Microsoft advocates used to use when defending it's platform decisions. "Why shouldn't Microsoft bundle Internet Explorer with their OS. It's their platform. Screw Netscape. Microsoft can do what they want. It makes for a much better experience" People often ask me why I use Windows 7 as a development platform instead of OSX. My response is usually a joke and a quip "someone beat me with a Mac when I was young". Frankly, it was seeing the history of Apple's treatment of it's developers. Yes, they have great products if want to tow the line and follow Apple's rules. But, beware. When Apple decides to change the rules on you mid stream, you're not going to have much recourse. ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple especially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#The_Microsoft_deal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#The_Microsoft_... http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/history/timeline/ http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/history/timeline/ edit: clarity and spelling.
chanux 17y ago
Go Apple! Go take the revenge!!.
jpcx01 17y ago
I blame Adobe in part for 3.3.1. I just hate the fact that good developers have to suffer in the aftermath of this useless battle. Why couldn't Apple just say succinctly in the TOS... "ADOBE AINT WELCOME HERE NO MO".
blue1 17y ago
I don't understand. I believe that if you take away the Creative Suite from OS X, the macintosh platform loses its main professional niche. It would be suicidal for Apple to do this. But Apple seems not afraid of this possibility. Maybe is Apple retargeting its line of computers just as development platforms for the portable devices?

154 points by larryrubin 17y ago

The plot thickens...

You know I think Steve Jobs maybe is doing the right thing for Apple by not allowing all of these cross compilers. I mean, that article really gave me a look at the history that Jobs is talking about when he says these cross-compiler vendors never support Apple as a first class citizen. I don't LIKE it. But I have a better understanding for it now. Adobe, obviously, always wants to target windows first. Companies like Unity and MonoTouch obviously are more in the C# and even .Net camp. These guys are targeting iPhone as an afterthought. And while we know their products do not run well on macs at the moment, I used to think that they would run well on macs in the future. I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe Apple does need to go it alone with respect to middleware. Even better, some enterprising start up could make an Objective-C game engine.

barrkel 17y ago
He's not outlawing cross compilers. He's outlawing innovation in third party tools and frameworks on the iPhone platform. The clause is much more broad than cross compilation.
- ecq 17y ago
  it's his platform, it's his rules. you don't like it, Android's probably for you.
- chancho 17y ago
  So it's impossible to write an innovative tool or framework in C, Objective-C, C++ or Javascript?
  - barrkel 17y ago
    It's impossible to innovate except in those areas - all those languages, as implemented on the iPhone, have significant drawbacks, which shouldn't need to be explained to anyone with any history of programming in multiple languages.
    - chancho 17y ago
      Yeah of course, but languages which compile to C also have (huge, IMO) drawbacks, especially with regards to debugging and profiling, things that have a profound effect on the end user experience. I'm not trying to defend the restriction or anything. It's Jobs' right to pull this shit and its everyone else's right to move to Android. I just think it's less about innovation in tools and frameworks and more about keeping the platform isolated for business reasons. This is just an extension of the "no interpreters" rule, which more severely (IMO) hampers language and tool innovation.
      - eru 17y ago
        There are native compilers for languages other than C.
      - jpcx01 17y ago
        I dont get why people bring this up. It's Apple's right to .... Of course its Apple's right. I don't think anyone's advocating lawsuits. But it's our right to bitch, moan, complain, and try to convince everyone in the world that if Apple doesn't reverse course in due time, they should be attacked with an avalanche of internet mudslinging that will make Microsoft look like Ghandi in comparison. Apple of all companies knows the value of the tech and online community to their bottom line. I think its worth utilizing that to respond to their decisions and somehow influence them to move in the right direction.
- bilbo0s 17y ago
  Not really. An innovative person could make an Objective-C game engine, or a C++ game engine or what have you. The language does not disallow innovation in frameworks or third party tools, it opens up a new avenue for that innovation. Now mind you I don't agree with the path they have taken. But I do think it is important right now for cooler heads to prevail. Making statements like 'Apple is outlawing innovation...' is not contributing in a constructive fashion to the solution search. What are Apple's concerns? Are they legitimate? How can the developer community address Apple's concerns? If Apple sees not only real effort, but real progress towards addressing those concerns, perhaps it might be willing to loosen up on the reigns. As it stands though, the concerns Apple has are legitimate. Now that we know what they are, can we move towards addressing them. I just think that staking out these strident positions makes for good blog reading, but it is not going to solve anything. If we put our 'crowdsourced' heads together we can come up with a solution that could allow the situation to develop with positive impact with respect to everyone's interests.
  - watty 17y ago
    But I don't see the "quality" concerns that Jobs sees. Do you? Do you think it could be an excuse to maintain control over the development process and to hurt the Adobe CS5 release? They have a review process which is used for quality control yet they allow 60+ fart apps in the store! Why don't they tighten the review process on ALL apps (including non Objective-C apps)? I guess you could say it would cost more to hire reviewers but the money made on the new app sales would certainly cover that (and much more). To me it's just a huge slap in the face to end users who will miss out on much app potential (assuming the reviewers did their job) and to developers who have dedicated time in learning a 3rd party framework - yet so many people here and other places seem to love it.
chime 17y ago
> these cross-compiler vendors never support Apple as a first class citizen. Apps should be judged on their own merits, not based on the original language they were coded in.
- tptacek 17y ago
  That logic terminates in a place that disallows any company from making any business decision ever that might negatively impact any class of developer.
  - enjo 17y ago
    I don't get this. I'm assuming most of the folks here are in development in one form or another, and very few of them work for Apple. Therefore, it is in everyone's collective best interest to have as many free and open platforms as possible. What Apple is doing is attempting to leverage their current success into future success by cutting off an avenue for cross platform authoring. This isn't about users. It's not about quality. It's about savvy developers (that's us) looking for ways to support multiple mobile platforms as painlessly (and profitably) as possible. That's not in Apple's best interest, but it sure as hell is in mine. This isn't a legal question (yet), but as a developer this pisses me off. It should piss you off too.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - tptacek 17y ago
      It doesn't piss me off, because I think it has more to do with the quality of the platform, and I don't think Apple owes anyone a cross-platform dev environment.
  - statictype 17y ago
    Let's say you hired 2 developers from Albania. Let's say it didn't pan out. Would you change your interview process to ban all developers from Albania? Or would you change your interview process to weed out low-quality candidates? Forget about the legal and moral issues. Which argument makes more sense?
necrecious 17y ago
Exactly, I find all this outrage online to be a pointless exercise. A better usage of time is to write a cross-platform Objective-C based game engine. http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/04/09/section-3-3-1-is-good-news-to-native-iphone-developers/ http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/04/09/section-...
mrkurt 17y ago
MonoTouch doesn't target anything but the iPhone OS. It's hardly an afterthought. Titanium targets both the iPhone OS and Android, but it's pretty clearly aimed primarily at the iPhone. The Lua stuff Tapulous uses in their games is targeted only at the iPhone OS. Nintendo of all people is happy to let game devs build stuff with Unity. The trend continues, really. I have no idea how crappy the apps are that the Adobe stuff produces, but I do know that these other toolkits are (a) extremely useful and (b) now off limits if I want to do anything on the iPhone. I suspect that if you dug through what's there, the Unity/MonoTouch stuff would prove to be of a higher average quality than the straight ObjC apps. People who look around and choose toolkits like this are generally pretty smart.
Hexstream 17y ago
"Even better, some enterprising start up could make an Objective-C game engine." Isn't a game engine a bit like some sort of interpreter (which are banned on the iPhone)?...
- xsmasher 17y ago
  No, a game engine could be a collection of classes or functions that perform common game-related tasks; like a library. There's no reason it needs to include an interpreter, alhough using a scripting language for some parts like AI and level triggers is convenient.

pistoriusp 17y ago

This explains my disdain for almost everything Adobe on OS X. It's not just that Flash sucks on my Mac. It's that almost all their products suck... They're not focused on OS X. And I'm not the only person: http://dearadobe.com/top_rated.php http://dearadobe.com/top_rated.php

cmelbye 17y ago
Reading the Acrobat Reader gripes makes me appreciate having a wonderful, lean PDF viewer (Preview.app) built into the operating system, and it actually fits the look and feel of the rest of the OS unlike Acrobat.
barrkel 17y ago
Change the framing of this for a second. Suppose instead of Apple, it was the government deciding which apps get approved, and which don't. Would you support the government to make the correct decisions, by fiat? Or would you rather a free market see opportunities in crappy applications, and produce better alternatives?
- asimjalis 17y ago
  The free market allows Apple the freedom to limit who can enter their app store, just as it allows me the freedom to limit which apps I approve of and buy.
- gabrielroth 17y ago
  Boy, that's a terrible analogy. What we're beginning to see in smartphones is a competition between different business models: one (Apple) that exercises a lot of control over the platform, and another (Android) that exercises very little control. We'll get to see how that plays out. That's the free market for you.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    And in a similar way, everybody has freedom of government, because they can just move to another country, right? Except it's often not that simple. People can be locked in in lots of different ways, and suffer at the hands of a dictator, one way or another.

barrkel 17y ago

This article is, frankly, childish. Apple was a fading platform when Adobe made that decision, and it made perfect business sense. Until about 2008, the last time I had even seen a Mac on this (Eastern) side of the Atlantic was about 1991 or so.

Asa-Nisse 17y ago
The point is that flash is a fading technology now... in a few years HTML5 will replace it for video purposes. The iPhone is a better gaming plattform. What if Apple released a similar technology to run Obj-C applications in the browser (think of the market for the already developed games to the iPhone)
- pan69 17y ago
  "What if Apple released a similar technology to run Obj-C applications in the browser" Like Mircosoft tried to with with ActiveX? I don't think so...
  - watty 17y ago
    After what we've seen lately it seems that many Apple users WOULD love it. The end users are the ones here getting hurt by these grudges - why can't they see it? There are great Unity3D, Appcelerator, and Flash apps that will never be made on the App store. How does that not bother you as an end user?
  - heresy 17y ago
    Heard of Google NaCl? Yeah. Native code in a browser without the security implications.
    - tedunangst 17y ago
      And without all that pesky portability either.
- andrewvc 17y ago

n8agrin 17y ago

Somehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time. I don't 100% agree with Apple's decision to ban non-native language apps, nor do I 100% disdain Adobe (Lightroom is a phenomenal product IMHO). But my dislike of Flash, the now comical number of bloggers jumping on the "Apple is evil, look at their SDK" bandwagon, and this statement all together made me laugh.

csomar 17y ago

My opinion is that Apple is trying to make its platform as closed as possible. Like that people who want to develop for iPad, needs to buy a Mac, use Apple software development tools, use Apple browser... and Apple takes care of distribution and other things. This is exactly like working for Apple as an employee, but instead of getting paid a fixed salary, you get paid as much as you work and as much as your product sells. So you now know the rules. Either accept and work for Apple, or look for another more open platform (and there are opportunities with Windows Mobile, Symbian, Maemo, Android...) For those who think Apple is in War with Adobe, I highly doubt it. Adobe can shut down their CS suit for Mac. So I just think it's a track and a culture, Apple is taking and working on. If you like it, work with them. If you don't, there are other options in the market; if you don't find anything that suits you in this world, so build a nice world of your own.

sunchild 17y ago
It's pretty clear that Apple is maneuvering to ensure that CS5 is not must-have software for Mac users. If you want to see an example of a vendor closing ranks to the detriment of users, look no further than Adobe.

adelevie 17y ago

I read posts mentioning "crappy [Flash] ports" to obj-c and protecting "customers from [Adobe's] shitty product". If the port is crappy, then reject it for being crappy, don't reject it because of the tools used to build it.

radley 17y ago

What a tool. It's a shame this made it to Techmeme. He really had to twist the facts to make his point. Here's what he didn't say: ZDNet 2001 (Dec 2001) Article is actually Adobe: OS X's new best friend? "Analysts and creative professionals say that Adobe's release of products for OS X could be the most significant turning point in the new operating system's adoption." "Developers privately complained of stability issues with the original release of OS X, saying that these problems hampered their efforts to move their products to the new operating system. That finally changed in September, when Apple issued the Mac OS X 10.1 update." A slice from 2002 Article is from March '02: OSX 10.2.1 was established as default OS on Macs only 3 months prior! What he left out: "Adobe is actively working to add support for the full version of Acrobat 5.0 running in OS X native mode." "Adobe currently plans to offer native support for OS X in the next major release of After Effects." etc. CNet 2004 "At the same time, Apple has quietly pushed Adobe out of a few markets by selling its own applications or bundling them into its OS X operating system. " John Nack, 2006 (Feb '06) No Intel OS X updated Adobe apps till 07 "Ever since Apple's Intel announcement last summer, they've told the industry (at least the consumer side) that Intel Macs would appear by summer 2006." Wikipedia: "On January 10, 2006, the new MacBook Pro and iMac became the first Apple computers to use Intel's Core Duo CPU. By August 7, 2006 Apple had transitioned the entire Mac product line to Intel chips, over 1 year sooner than announced."

mtarnovan 17y ago
He has a point, although the way he arrives at the conclusion is flawed. Adobe made a rational business decision at a time when nobody could have predicted the Apple renascence. This decision might cost them dearly now, but that doesn't mean that given the facts known at that time, they should have made a different one.
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hristov 17y ago

I was wondering how Apple PR would handle this issue, and they are being very clever. They try to frame this purely as a spat between Apple and Adobe. And lets face it, nobody really likes Adobe nowadays because of various issues about cross-compatibility of Flash and their attempts to kill HTML 5. So of course Apple is confident that once the issue is framed as a spat between Apple and Adobe most developers would go on Apple's side. But is that really the main issue? If you think about it, the controversial section of the agreement affects much more important issues that Adobe and flash.

noamsml 17y ago

What sort of fucking joke is this? Saying that some sort of karma game should determine developers' freedom to use the tools necessary for the job? That not supporting a certain platform merits an artificial limitation on the platform? Please.

raysinbran 17y ago

Bingo. Apple doesn't ever want to find itself in a position where it has to depend on 3rd party tools keeping up with its OS evolution. If/when Android ends up being the dominant mobile platform, every dev house will likely make a "business decision" to use cross-platform tools. The control point for app innovation would then be in third party hands. And as for losing out on innovation because developers can't make their own tools, I'm sure Apple isn't worried about that at all. They seem to have enough in-house innovation to run circles around what the competition has to offer, for the past ten years.

wrinklz 17y ago

Finally a balanced analysis of the iPad developer agreement. Screw you, Adobe!

iamelgringo 17y ago

Wow, what a dramatic re-interpretation of events. I was using Macs primarily for graphics work in the late 90's and early 00's. The close relationship between Adobe and Apple was the reason to be on the platform then. Graphic designers and creatives were one of the few markets that Apple had left. Believe it or not, but Apple owes a large part of it's existence through the 90's to Adobe's support of their platform. In fact, Apple and Adobe signed an exclusive deal to only ship Photoshop on Mac's in the early years. Steve Jobs left, the company floundered and almost went belly up. They sued Microsoft for patent infringement, and Microsoft settled by investing $150 million in Apple, and becoming one of Apple's largest shareholders at the time. That helped Apple survive, and it gave Microsoft a reasonable competitor, so it wouldn't have to fight as many charges of being monopolistic. Ever wonder why so much Apple advertising punches Microsoft, but Microsoft doesn't really punch back? So, with the second coming of Steve Jobs and a fresh infusion of cash from Microsoft. Apple decided to completely rewite their code base from scratch based on what he had been doing at Next. OS9 died, and OSX was born. And, while those were great moves for Apple as a company, Adobe was faced with a very difficult choice: whether or not to port millions of lines of code over to a new OS that represented less than 3% of the computing market. Apple was making a "bet the farm" move, and expected Adobe to come along for the ride. Then Apple was pissed because Adobe didn't jump on the band wagon immediately and pony up the millions of dollars it would have cost to port their entire suite of apps to the new OS. Three years after the launch of OSX, Apple made another "Bet the farm" move, and decided to migrate OSX from PowerPC chips to Intel processors. Again, not only did Apple expect Adobe and the rest of their developer ecosystem to port their applications to a new OS, but 3 years after the new OS launched, they expected another dramatic round of rewrites to accommodate Apple's business and technical decisions. But, Adobe did begin porting their software, and in the middle of all those changes, Apple chose to start competing directly with Adobe by launching Final Cut Pro at roughly the same time that Adobe was launching Premiere Pro. A year or two following that, Apple purchased Shake a video compositing app that directly competed with After Effects. Needless to say, relations have been a bit strained between the companies for the last 10 years. As far as I've been able to tell, Apple makes decisions that help Apple. They tend to have a "love us or leave us" approach to their developer ecosystem. Microsoft used to play hardball like that all the time with their developers and with companies that ran on their platform. But they got slapped with anti-trust lawsuits. They play much nicer with other kids than Apple does these days. The only reason that Apple can get away with this, is because they are still seen as the "under dog" by many. I suspect that perception might be changing. It's been so strange to hear a lot of arguments coming from Apple fans that Microsoft advocates used to use when defending it's platform decisions. "Why shouldn't Microsoft bundle Internet Explorer with their OS. It's their platform. Screw Netscape. Microsoft can do what they want. It makes for a much better experience" People often ask me why I use Windows 7 as a development platform instead of OSX. My response is usually a joke and a quip "someone beat me with a Mac when I was young". Frankly, it was seeing the history of Apple's treatment of it's developers. Yes, they have great products if want to tow the line and follow Apple's rules. But, beware. When Apple decides to change the rules on you mid stream, you're not going to have much recourse. ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple especially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#The_Microsoft_deal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#The_Microsoft_... http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/history/timeline/ http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/history/timeline/ edit: clarity and spelling.

chanux 17y ago

Go Apple! Go take the revenge!!.

jpcx01 17y ago

I blame Adobe in part for 3.3.1. I just hate the fact that good developers have to suffer in the aftermath of this useless battle. Why couldn't Apple just say succinctly in the TOS... "ADOBE AINT WELCOME HERE NO MO".

blue1 17y ago

I don't understand. I believe that if you take away the Creative Suite from OS X, the macintosh platform loses its main professional niche. It would be suicidal for Apple to do this. But Apple seems not afraid of this possibility. Maybe is Apple retargeting its line of computers just as development platforms for the portable devices?