3 ms·

>All the technical justification you need can be had from Adobe's other half, which only 3 days ago shipped their first Photoshop for Mac which doesn't use Mac

by ergo98 17y ago

>All the technical justification you need can be had from Adobe's other half, which only 3 days ago shipped their first Photoshop for Mac which doesn't use Mac OS Classic GUI APIs. Humorous given that Apple has several very prominent apps (iTunes, Final Cut Pro) that still have made the migration. And they control both sides! However that is irrelevant. Tell me again how, if Apple revises the API, that suddenly every app available will instantly morph to accommodate it? Of course that is completely and utterly asinine. It's a ridiculous argument that I can't believe knowledgeable people have, desperately trying to reach some sort of rationalization of Apple's actions.

cheald 17y ago
To put it even more starkly, if Apple were to revise the API, then the middleware pushes an update, and all those hundreds or thousand of app developers simply recompile with the new OS target. All of their apps are now feature-compatible with Shiny New Feature X, rather than those hundreds or thousands of developers all having to replicate the same work. This is Frameworks 101. The entire point of an abstraction layer is to isolate a developer away from the underlying systems, to let him write more business logic and less systems support code. All modern software development is built on the concept of frameworks, layers of abstraction, and the like. Even Objective C itself is an abstraction away from the ARM11 instruction set on the iPhone's CPU. Do developers writing Objective C produce inherently inferior apps to those writing ARM11 assembly? Frameworks reduce the total number of man-hours required to produce and maintain software. I will argue that a good framework produces more high quality software than a bunch of developers all rolling apps on the metal, which then have a longer lifetime, due to the fact that fewer developer hours are required per app to maintain it moving forward. (Please note that I am not making any kind of judgment here about whether or not CS5 constitutes a "good framework".) It takes some pretty serious denial to see Jobs' case against middleware, cross-compilers, and abstraction layers as anything but an attempt to lock developers solely into the Apple ecosystem. Frameworks reduce developer hours in more than one way - they reduce the number of hours required to put your app on multiple platforms. (To put it another way, this is why we have 3D engines like Unreal and Crytek; it's why we have 3D API layers like OpenGL and DirectX. You can write a game without them, but you'll spend thousands of hours solving problems that have already been solved for no appreciable benefit.) It's abundantly clear that there is no real technical justification for the clause; Apple is attempting to increase the amount of work that developers have to do to target multiple platforms, so that they'll simply give up and pick one: Apple's.
tptacek 17y ago
Could you stop using words like "vapid", "ridiculous", and "asinine"? Developers who build on Flash can't multitask until the iPhone Flash runtime exposes the multitasking API. The developers of those applications are beholden to Adobe to get access to a core iPhone OS feature. This is not a complicated argument. Reasonable people can disagree about whether this is a valid reason to lock down the compiler toolchain for the OS. But I don't think a reasonable person can pretend that there's no opposing argument, no matter where they start from.
- ergo98 17y ago
  >Could you stop using words like "vapid", "ridiculous", and "asinine"? No. It is what it is. You don't like it because it undermines your blatant, translucent apologism. >Developers who build on Flash can't multitask until the iPhone Flash runtime exposes the multitasking API. The sort of apps built with Flash are unlikely to be the sort that would need to access the multitasking API. That's a specious, ridiculous example. Your example is as logical as Microsoft banning any language but C# from ASP.NET because hypothetically it will be the first to take advantage of a new IIS feature. Thankfully most people realize how damaging and absurd such an argument is. >The developers of those applications are beholden to Adobe to get access to a core iPhone OS feature. NO THEY ARE NOT See, they have the choice whether to use the toolkit or not. If it doesn't stay current, and their apps aren't as saleable because they don't take advantage of the latest innovation or use the latest instruction set or yield the best performance, developers migrate away. That's how "free markets" work. Apple completely undermined that, yet remarkable the faithful go forth to sell the pitch despite having a complete absence of empirical standing for it. >This is not a complicated argument. Right. It isn't. Honestly I'm surprised I haven't been moderated to -infinity, as Hacker News is generally a clearinghouse of pro-Apple apologism. If this place is starting to get more centrist, Apple really is in trouble (PG already alluded to this a couple of essays ago)
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    > The sort of apps built with Flash are unlikely to be the sort that would need to access the multitasking API. The sort of apps built with the iPhone SDK are unlikely to be the sort that would need to access the Flash runtime. > See, they have the choice whether to use the toolkit or not. See, developers have the choice whether to distribute apps via the app store or not. There's always the web. See how that works?

by ergo98 17y ago

cheald 17y ago

To put it even more starkly, if Apple were to revise the API, then the middleware pushes an update, and all those hundreds or thousand of app developers simply recompile with the new OS target. All of their apps are now feature-compatible with Shiny New Feature X, rather than those hundreds or thousands of developers all having to replicate the same work. This is Frameworks 101. The entire point of an abstraction layer is to isolate a developer away from the underlying systems, to let him write more business logic and less systems support code. All modern software development is built on the concept of frameworks, layers of abstraction, and the like. Even Objective C itself is an abstraction away from the ARM11 instruction set on the iPhone's CPU. Do developers writing Objective C produce inherently inferior apps to those writing ARM11 assembly? Frameworks reduce the total number of man-hours required to produce and maintain software. I will argue that a good framework produces more high quality software than a bunch of developers all rolling apps on the metal, which then have a longer lifetime, due to the fact that fewer developer hours are required per app to maintain it moving forward. (Please note that I am not making any kind of judgment here about whether or not CS5 constitutes a "good framework".) It takes some pretty serious denial to see Jobs' case against middleware, cross-compilers, and abstraction layers as anything but an attempt to lock developers solely into the Apple ecosystem. Frameworks reduce developer hours in more than one way - they reduce the number of hours required to put your app on multiple platforms. (To put it another way, this is why we have 3D engines like Unreal and Crytek; it's why we have 3D API layers like OpenGL and DirectX. You can write a game without them, but you'll spend thousands of hours solving problems that have already been solved for no appreciable benefit.) It's abundantly clear that there is no real technical justification for the clause; Apple is attempting to increase the amount of work that developers have to do to target multiple platforms, so that they'll simply give up and pick one: Apple's.

tptacek 17y ago

Could you stop using words like "vapid", "ridiculous", and "asinine"? Developers who build on Flash can't multitask until the iPhone Flash runtime exposes the multitasking API. The developers of those applications are beholden to Adobe to get access to a core iPhone OS feature. This is not a complicated argument. Reasonable people can disagree about whether this is a valid reason to lock down the compiler toolchain for the OS. But I don't think a reasonable person can pretend that there's no opposing argument, no matter where they start from.

ergo98 17y ago
>Could you stop using words like "vapid", "ridiculous", and "asinine"? No. It is what it is. You don't like it because it undermines your blatant, translucent apologism. >Developers who build on Flash can't multitask until the iPhone Flash runtime exposes the multitasking API. The sort of apps built with Flash are unlikely to be the sort that would need to access the multitasking API. That's a specious, ridiculous example. Your example is as logical as Microsoft banning any language but C# from ASP.NET because hypothetically it will be the first to take advantage of a new IIS feature. Thankfully most people realize how damaging and absurd such an argument is. >The developers of those applications are beholden to Adobe to get access to a core iPhone OS feature. NO THEY ARE NOT See, they have the choice whether to use the toolkit or not. If it doesn't stay current, and their apps aren't as saleable because they don't take advantage of the latest innovation or use the latest instruction set or yield the best performance, developers migrate away. That's how "free markets" work. Apple completely undermined that, yet remarkable the faithful go forth to sell the pitch despite having a complete absence of empirical standing for it. >This is not a complicated argument. Right. It isn't. Honestly I'm surprised I haven't been moderated to -infinity, as Hacker News is generally a clearinghouse of pro-Apple apologism. If this place is starting to get more centrist, Apple really is in trouble (PG already alluded to this a couple of essays ago)
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  > The sort of apps built with Flash are unlikely to be the sort that would need to access the multitasking API. The sort of apps built with the iPhone SDK are unlikely to be the sort that would need to access the Flash runtime. > See, they have the choice whether to use the toolkit or not. See, developers have the choice whether to distribute apps via the app store or not. There's always the web. See how that works?