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>The truth is Apple doesn't want to be disintermediated. Apple wants developers to be strictly dependent on its tools and APIs, and not use anything between the

>The truth is Apple doesn't want to be disintermediated. Apple wants developers to be strictly dependent on its tools and APIs, and not use anything between the app and the platform. This is particularly offensive to me as a software developer, and it's far worse than anything Microsoft has ever tried to pull. It's the reason why 3.3.1 is phrased the way it is, and it has nothing to do with Flash and everything to do with locking developers in. Microsoft did the same thing with DirectX and OpenGL. OpenGL was cross-platform. Microsoft stopped supporting it, and instead insisted that developers use DirectX. This essentially killed cross-platform gaming for Mac/Linux. DirectX games port between Microsoft platforms and Microsoft's Console, but require significant middleware to port to OpenGL and non-Win32 platforms. Use of an API, public and documented, is a form of dependence and lock-in. Apple has done. Microsoft does it. Oracle does it.

barrkel 16y ago
There's nothing stopping you from using an OpenGL api that's built on top of DirectX, though. What Apple has done here is say that you can't put an API between you and the underlying API such that you are insulated to some degree from platform changes; but even worse, they've mandated which languages (!!!) you can use to interop with that API, which is almost criminal, technically speaking. (Of course it's not de jure criminal. Just for the reading comprehension impaired.)