To which Apple had this to say:



Everyone at Adobe has their heads so far up their arses you can barely even make out what they're saying any more. I mean, for them to call out Apple when their own technology is a locked-down proprietary hunk of crap, which as recently as a few years back, when it still belonged to Macromedia, they were championing against... Well, that's just rich.

While Apple wants to keep control of what ships on their own platform by default as well as what applications are available through its own storefront, Adobe (primarily) wants to put encumbering and unnecessary proprietary wrappers on the whole of the web. They're looking to restrict your personal content, keep web applications dumbed-down, inspire and foster a less tech- savvy developer base and pretty just monetize the most basic parts of the web. Take a plain H.264 video for example and then wrap it in Flash to limit its playback to only Adobe software. Great idea!

Adobe is about the bottom line, like all other successful companies. And because they can't storm their recent wares onto a particular platform they're throwing tantrums right and left. I'm sure their stock holders are going to love these types of off-the-cuff comments. Especially when companies like Apple are steamrolling ahead actively working on putting money in shareholders' pockets with record-breaking quarter after record-breaking quarter.

The entire existence of mobile Flash rests in the hands of one company, and it's not Adobe. It's Google. Adobe still has a tremendous opportunity in the web space, and they should stop trying to push the Flash cart sooner rather than later to maximize their potential. Flash doesn't look like it has much of a future if you ask me.

As much as I've complained about Apple and the iPhone's misses, Adobe has completely poisoned me on their brand with their actions and words. I wish I could easily give up Lightroom and Illustrator, but I can't.

I think the author was mostly saying that the Apple system is the closed environment, not stuff like flash (I mean, flash is closed, but the author was aiming at Apple).

It's the closed Apple environment that the author thinks will drive developers away. I think it should, but I don't think it will.

That quote was from Apple's rep in direct response to Adobe's project manager.

Closed environment? With a published SDK, freely downloadable build environment and tools, plus documentation and example code.... The iPhone platform is anything but closed. It's controlled, I'll give you that. And perhaps too tightly controlled in some respects, which I'll give you as well. But it's the complete opposite of a closed environment.

Now if you wanted to say that the Nintendo Wii, DS or Sony Playstations are closed I might be inclined to agree with you.

By the way... The last great hope for Flash, that game everyone's mom is playing, Farmville, is coming to the iPhone (and iPad) as a native app. Seems like developers can't jump Adobe's ship fast enough.

And or course, there is always the ability to just write an HTML 5 app, point people to a URL, and have them add it to their home screen. All without ever touching Apple tools or a Mac, and without having to go through Apple's approval process and the store. Apple will even add it to their list of web apps if you submit it to them. http://www.apple.com/webapps/

Developers are the ones choosing to support the iPhone and it's "closed" environment, so for most of them, it must be worth it.

The traditional closed model is that only approved developers have any access to development tools for a system. Apple's model is that only approved developers have access to install anything on the system. It's functionally equivalent, except for that the developers have to develop the application before finding out whether they'll be approved or not.

I don't see anything wrong with calling that 'closed'.

This is true, and HTML5 plus all its cohorts might equal Flash's abilities.

Out of curiosity, how well does this run on an iPhone/iPod touch/iPad?

It runs fine, but of course you can't play it as there are no keys to press.

Oh. Hrm.

The same seems to be true with my Android.

Hey, now that's the neatest take on Tetris that I've seen, yet!

Aw man, I was going to ditch this conversation but I should have figured I couldn't.

I'm tired of people comparing development for Apple with development for the console video game market. They talked about this on Buzz Out Loud a week ago, and had a game developer write in about how it was just as difficult to develop for console companies, and how they'll reject your app for the tiniest little errors like forgetting to capitalize something.

I consequently wrote them an email that they read on the air. My argument (and I'm paraphrasing my email) was that this developer was complaining about the stringency of the requirements the game studios placed upon him, but from what he said himself, he knows those rules up front, and if he does things correctly they game will get through.

The complaint about the App Store is that the approval department is capricious at best. The least of the problems is that you don't know whether your app will be approved while you're developing it. Your app can get approved, you start making money on it, and then get removed later on. The latest was that app that taught kids how to program. To be honest, I agreed with their reasons for not allowing it in the store, because it plainly violated their rules, but it shouldn't have been approved to begin with.

So the primary reason the comparison between App Store approval and game company approval is completely inaccurate is that I've never heard of a game being pulled off every single store shelf because Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Sega, Atari, etc determined after the fact that they didn't like something about it. If it's happened, I'd wager you could count the number of titles on one hand, whereas Apple has pulled hundreds of apps in this manner.

Crap, that was way more time than I wanted to devote to this nonsense. This argument is tiring. I like the iPhone as a product, and the App Store was a brilliant innovation in the world of mobile communication and devices. That doesn't change the fact that Apple's approval process is terrible, and anyone developing for them now has no excuse to be upset if something Apple does completely disrupts their business.

You won't get any arguments from me about Apple's app store and approval process. Shite and irregular.

But I will say that I was not comparing consoles to the iPhone. They're completely different in terms of development. I was only giving up consoles as proper examples of closed systems. Despite what Bitt mentioned, the iPhone is anything but closed, and I don't know anyone else that uses the same definition of closed he supplied.

Now the reason I came in here....

Seems like the Adobe and Google partnership is on. It's the only way to get any motion against Apple for them I'm sure.

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/04/adobe_air_on_the_android_platf.html

We may see some real Flash action on a mobile handset yet. It's not likely to make any difference to iPhone sales nor the performance of the App Store, but it's going to be interesting to see nonetheless.

Okay, define "closed" for me.

To my knowledge, there are two related definitions of closed vs. open architectures in computing.

One has to do with hardware. I think we can all agree that no cellphone is open architecture. I don't think this is necessarily by design, but is a consequence of miniaturization. Regardless, that's clearly not what we're talking about anyway.

The other is software related. It was popularized in the 80s when Unix vendors were trying to get people to move away from mainframes, the idea being that if you invested in mainframe software development, that software would take a huge amount of effort to run under any other system, effectively locking you in to their platform, whereas Unix had universal APIs (open standards) so that if you wanted to change hardware vendors, you didn't have unrecoupable development costs with the old system.

If you want to develop for the iPhone, your only target is the iPhone. There are no other even vaguely compatible vendors. If you develop for Flash, there are potentially many compatible hardware vendors. In addition, Apple has decided to contractually prevent you from using any technology that would allow you to be able to recoup your development costs. Their intention is for you to find it to be too much effort to develop for a second platform. It's vendor lock-in, very straightforwardly, and is exactly what the term "open systems" was popularized to be in opposition to.

That said, using Flash also locks you into using Flash, where there are no other (virtual) hardware vendors, though they have relaxed their licensing to allow there to be other hardware vendors. (Maybe that was always the case; I'm not sure.) So I'm not saying that Flash is really any better. Java would make more sense, since it actually is an open standard, but that's neither here nor there, since Apple's license precludes Java, too.

Are you pulling my leg here? If you're being genuine, then I'm sorry, but you don't have the faintest idea about what it takes to develop for the iPhone or any other platform for which you can compile C or C++.



Wow, completely disingenuous from where I sit. First and foremost, the iPhone is the primary platform which would enable any developer to recoup their development costs. It currently features the healthiest marketplace. Secondly, see the first point above this quote. There are a lot of developers out there who would disagree with you.



Like the Mac right?



Like the Mac here too right?




But you are saying it's not closed, are you not? Develop with Flash and you have... A Flash applet. That's not generally real software. It's a bloody script. BUt of course that's besides the point. It's closed because despite what's on paper, there is no one outside of Adobe that can (or does) support Flash at this moment in time. You're not comparing the right things here. You need to compare Flash to C. C is open. Flash is not. C is a standard. Flash is not. C can be used for multiple targets, Flash cannot.



As another language comparison, yes it would make more sense. But Java does offer more than just the language, along with it controls. An ugly heap.

Write your business/back-end logic so it's portable. Write your front-end code for the platform. The iPhone is no more difficult to port to than any other platform. Many people would argue that it's far easier in fact.

But at the end of the day, I'm finding way too many debates and arguments when I come here and that's not what draws me to this forum in the first place. So I'll agree that the iPhone does not match up with your definition of Open nor will it line up with the Free Software Foundation's definition of the same likely. But, anyone is free to develop for it using languages and compilers that are available on countless systems (C, C++, gcc) albeit via Apple's Xcode IDE. And code can be ported from and to other systems. I hope you can agree with that too.

And that was true of the languages back in the 70s when there was an antitrust suit against IBM. Backend code is usually the easiest part of any application, at least in my experience. Making it work under the specific environment of the OS is far harder and more time consuming.


No, "disingenuous" is you pretending you couldn't infer that I was talking about changing platforms.


I'm not sure what you're getting at. Yeah, if you want to develop specifically for the Mac/Cocoa, it's no easier to port to X11 or Win32 than the equivalent iPhone to Android or WinMo or WebOS. But under MacOS, you can create your program with Qt, wxWidgets, Java/AWT, Gtk+, Tk, etc., ad infinitum. And from a pure programming point of view, you can use C, C++, and Objective C, like on the iPhone, plus Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, Scheme, Fortran, Ada, Haskell, COBOL, etc., the first four of which are installed by default. None of this is allowed on the iPhone.


No, it's closed. It's not *as* closed as iPhoneOS is now. People are free to implement "hardware" (a Flash player) to support Flash applications. (Heck, someone could implement a Flash player in actual hardware. That would be kinda neat.) You are not allowed to implement a compiler. But if you decided that you wanted to move to Java, for example, that would be a gigantic headache, and amounts to lock-in.


I'm afraid I didn't follow that at all. Java is far more than just a language. Most notably, it's a virtual machine architecture, but so is Flash. It's also a set of standard libraries. I'm not sure what "controls" you're talking about.

New letter from Steve Jobs' fingers: Flash will NEVER come to the iPhone.

And mark my words, while Apple has thrown Adobe a bone with video acceleration API support in 10.6.3, I believe they fully intend/expect/desire Flash's outright demise on all platforms.

Disclaimer: I'm relaying news/events, I'm not looking to start a debate on the merits of Flash. My opinion is that it's closed and as out-dated as the floppy disk and needs to die as quickly as possible. No one is going to change that opinion.

I agree with much of what he says there. But one bit grates.

He complains that Adobe have been slow to move Photoshop to Cocoa. He forgets to mention that Finder only recently moved to Cocoa and that Apple's big cross platform app (iTunes) still isn't Cocoa.

I completely agree. The Cocoa example of Adobe embracing Mac OS X was poor. Better would have been the move to Intel, which took a while, but nothing compared to the 10 year gap Steve tried to paint there.

Cocoa doesn't make for a better application anyway. It's just that current frameworks and APIs are no longer being exposed in Carbon, so if you don't want to re-invent the wheel, you go Cocoa.


EDIT: Oh, I did think of one possible way Flash would come to the iPhone... If Apple were to buy Adobe, I believe there's a chance you'd see them singing a different tune about Flash - about their new version of Flash anyway.