iPhone OS 4

iPhone OS 4 reveal on April 8th. Historically, Apple ran these preview events in March. Seems their yearly major OS update schedule is still mostly on track, with just a slight delay due to getting the iPad out the door.

So what do people think the biggest change will be?

I'm going for some kind of multitasking and probably more bluetooth features.

I wouldn't mind a normal file system, either...

I expect there to be some significant changes to app management. I would also not be surprised if there was some sort of addition of data to the unlock screen.

I'd be amazed if some sort of third party app backgrounding wasn't unveiled. I'd expect some sort of scheme were apps can register services that run separate to the main app and can respond to system events. I doubt very much that full apps will get to run in the background.

You mean like upcoming appointments and stuff like that? It's the one thing my crappy work WinMo phone does that I like.

Me neither, some kind of simple task manager/switcher would be better than nothing. There's only really a handful of apps I can think of that actually 'need' to carry on running in the background. Most could simply save their state, free up resources (if possible) and then go to sleep until they're required again.

Some sort of background app support would be magical for Pandora users, but Apple doesn't seem terribly invested in helping companies compete with the iTunes Store via alternative music revenue models. The only other weakness that pisses me off on a regular basis is the fixed nature of the web browser. I want browser plugins, whether that means AdBlock or bookmarklets, or whatever else.

Meanwhile, has anybody else noticed, if you haven't used your iPhone for a few hours or overnight or whatnot that, when you wake it up and start using it again, it's really, really sluggish for a while? If there were a hard drive in there, I'd think it was swapping things back in from disk, but there isn't and, presumably, it's not. Maybe Apple will have some sort of fix for that? Or maybe it's just me.

Yes, though are you talking about the WinMo desktop that contains that info? If so, that's more akin to widgets than information on the lock screen. He's talking about having that information immediately upon power up from standby, when you're asked to unlock the phone.

Many people are hoping for that, and I think it would be a fantastic idea, something missing from many phones. There are a few apps for Android that do this, but none of them are customizable enough for me.

I think the iPad is what has many people hoping for this, because the large screen suddenly demonstrates how little that lock screen is utilized. Though, frankly, I think it's more important to have that info on iPhone, when very quick glances are what you want.


I wouldn't be surprised by some type of multitasking, though. Josh on the Engadget podcast conjectured that they could make it part of the approval process. Like, if you're making a 3D game, it wouldn't be allowed to run in the background. But if you're making something like a tasks or IM app, that doesn't take many CPU cycles at all, it could be allowed to run in the background while running other somewhat non-tasking apps.

Yes, I've not used the lock screen on my work phone for years, partly because the touchscreen on it is so crap, it made it very difficult to just prod the code in with your finger, unlike the iPhone. So it's always the first thing I see on the phone when it wake it up.

Now that I own an iPhone, an iPad, and a Mac, I'm really hoping iPhone OS 4 has something to tie these devices together in a better way. I hinted at my desire to just transition work between devices in the pre launch iPad thread, and it's becoming clear many more people are going to want the same. iWork on the iPad is a disaster if you want to also use a desktop at some point in the process. One of the people on MacBreak Weekly said it seemed like things had gone backwards to the days of floppies and no networks in an office, with everyone trying to manage what revision of a file was where.

Between 4.0, and the massive datacenter Apple is building in NC, I'm hoping they push for a more cloud based experience here to just sync everything.

Outside of that, I'll be really curious to see what 4.0 brings to the iPad. It's clear the device was rushed out the door a bit. The hardware is quite solid, but the Apple software side is a little lacking.

That's certainly what it sounds like to me. They don't seem keen on having any sort of file system access, so that sort of says "the cloud" to me.

Looking awesome so far

Well, nothing cloud related or sync related, so that's probably farther out then I hoped.

Major points seem to be:
1. Multitasking - Pretty much what was predicted, APIs provided so apps can run background related tasks, instead of having the full app in the background. Pandora can still play music and take over the system media controls, and GPS apps can keep routing users. Switching between apps is a double tap on the home button, and it reveals running apps in a tray that appears at the bottom. Looks very similar to the add a widget to the dashboard interface on OS X. I'm assuming this solves the issue of not being able to hold an SSH session open while referencing a web page, but not 100% certain.

2. Folders for organizing apps. The unique twist here is how it's done. Drag an app onto another one, and it makes a folder, defaulting the name to the category the two apps are in. This bumps the visible app limit from 180 to 2,160.

3. Mail. Unified inbox, fast inbox switching if you still want them separate, multiple Exchange account support (so now people can have gMail via Exchange along with work mail), threaded messages, and much like the iPad, ability to open attachments with third party apps. Unfortunately, still no smart folder support.

4. iBooks. Looks like 4.0 will build it into the OS, and sync page read/bookmarks across devices like the Kindle Whispersync.

5. Enterprise features including better encryption of mail, encryption for app data, and wireless app distribution.

6. Game Center - Think XBox Live, Steam, or Playstation Network. Friends lists, achievements, matchmaking and leaderboards. A few independent parties were doing similar, but very few games used the platforms out there. Apple officially supporting it should mean a lot more games will tie into it.

7. iAd, an advertising platform. This is probably the counter shot for Google entering the phone market. HTML5 based ads, allowing full video, mini games, and so on.

Multitasking is limited to the iPhone 3GS, the newest iPod Touch, and the iPad. The rest of 4.0 will still come out for the 3G and second gen iPod Touch, but no word about the initial iPhone. Looks like this is where the Apple mobile platform fractures a little bit, dumping off the 3 year old devices. Being that people tend to update their phones quicker then every 3 years, shouldn't be too big of a deal there. Will be interesting to see if this pushes people to upgrade their iPods more often though.

I'll be downloading the SDK and beta firmware here shortly, but it looks like it's covered under the standard prerelease NDA, so I won't be able to comment on it.

With this take on multitasking, Apple has deprecated the iPhone 3G in my pocket. This summer will be very interesting when it's time to replace it.

Although some are saying this actually helps Google, who is hoping that this shows there is actual competition in the mobile advertising space, and therefore the FTC should allow them to go through with their acquisition of AdMob.

As for the rest of the announcement, it seems like a good handful of updates, some of which are pretty big. I wouldn't have expected the folders thing, though. I would have thought it was too Android for them. Doesn't that complicate the UI?

Luckily I was planning on upgrading my 3G this summer anyway

I'm just hoping for a price-war of some sort between Apple and Android in some fashion or another. All those iPhone 3G users coming off their two-year contracts at the same exact time should make for a nice feeding frenzy.

Looks like the new developer agreement just took a bit of wind out of the Flash CS5 platform:

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flash_compiler

Wow. That affects a hell of a lot more than Flash. Dictating the languages that applications are allowed to be written in is awfully draconian. (No offense, Tom.)

It's something that I'm split on. I'll definitely agree it's draconian, and was posting it to point it out, not specifically defending it. But, on the other hand, this isn't really any different then requirements for other closed platforms. When you have a highly specialized platform, and want to present the best performance possible, it's the way to go.

*edit* Thinking long term here, forcing a specific development environment and language does allow Apple to change the underbelly of the devices if necessary without impacting much. Not sure if that is the specific reason here, but by ensuring all apps follow a certain rule, it's much easier to make a future iPad using an Intel processor compared to the current ARM chips. The exact bounds of what the emulation/translation layer need to do are known. But if other compilers are generating code, that becomes much harder.

Seems I am defending it now. Oh well. Just trying to understand the possible motivations here.

That note about required development platform along with Apple's design patent on the Cover Flow presentation marred an otherwise good day of Apple press.

I see the move with regards to the SDK as an extension of their no interpreted code rule. Basically people like Adobe got smart and instead of running an interpreter on the iPhone, they'd pre-compile. Apple is basically shutting that down with this new language in the SDK.

With regards to the patent.... WTF. The Cover Flow design was around for a couple of years before being acquired by Apple. I know that you have a finite time to patent an invention once you've disclosed it, maybe the same doesn't apply to a design patent? Anyway, more evidence that the patent system needs to go.

Not really. If I write and compile a program using C, it links against the OS's APIs. If I write the same program using C++, same thing. And it's still the same thing if I write it using Pascal, or Fortran, or Go, or Eiffel, or Caml, or Modula.

This is clearly Apple explicitly trying to limit the features of iPhoneOS, probably to prevent any sort of interpreted or virtual-machine-based constructs, and going at it like using an elephant rifle to kill a gnat.

Just to pick one thing that comes to mind, it means that any Infocom adventure game interpreters (that is, Z-machines, like Frotz) are forbidden.

Always have been.

But the OS would need APIs for all those languages right? iPhone OS APIs exist only in C, C++ and Objective-C. Adobe was getting Flash apps to work by doing something that (at least in my mind) would be very hard to guarantee future compatibility on the platform, compared to apps compiled in XCode.

Okay, I'm not familiar with the iPhoneOS, so I could be making an inaccurate assumption, but that's not the case for any other OS I've dealt with.

Okay, to be fair, I'm conflating APIs and ABIs, but there's really not a lot of difference in this case. When you natively compile a program, it has to make calls to subroutines that the OS provides. The OS defines the method by which those subroutines are found by the program, how data is passed back and forth, etc. Once you compile something natively, there's no difference in those calls between programs written in different languages. Think about the machine code or assembly code that a compiler produces: there's no real concept of functions or variables, there's just memory (and registers) to be accessed and a pointer to the currently executing instruction.

That said, it's possible that the iPhoneOS itself is something of a compatibility layer between iPhone apps and the "real" operating system. I've never even looked at developing for the iPhone, so I can't say for sure. Even if it were, though, there still has to be some defined way to call OS subroutines.

Edit: Regardless, there are any number of ways that people automatically convert one language to another. (The example that comes to mind here is TeX. Knuth wrote it in a language he designed called "Web", for which I don't believe there exist any compilers or interpreters. His original implementation used Pascal as an intermediary step. So if you want a TeX implementation for your iPhone, you're now out of luck.) They've explicitly disallowed that, and if you were to use the A{P,B}I Apple provides for that language, there would be no incompatibility issue. What difference is there between XCode typing "#include <iphone.h>" for me and some other program doing the exact same thing?

Someone should tell the folks who approved it for the App Store, then.

Yeah, I wasn't saying you were. It was a lame attempt at a joke, conflating "drakino" and "draconian".

There are a lot of approved apps that violate the SDK terms. And there are a lot of app rejections that don't.

I'm not a fan of Apple's app approval process nor their SDK terms.

John Gruber pretty much nails it with regard to the update to section 3.3.1 of the SDK licensing agreement: http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331

Cross-platform toolkits like Adobe's seek to commoditize the platform. That's not something Apple's going to stand for.

I'm starting to think it takes Apple about 2 years to react to things needed on the platform. 2 years ago, the first of the apps went under development for release that summer. And now they are addressing the lack of 3rd party multitasking. Cut and paste was missing from the initial device, and came in 2 years later. What got me thinking about this is that nothing today really addressed the notifications issue. Push messages for 3rd party apps only came in to the SDK a year ago, so it may take until iPhone OS 5 to really sort that mess out. And until then, OS 4 is only going to make it worse, with backgrounded apps able to send local notification alerts.

My problem is, like the App Store monopoly, this is like DRM. You don't really own your phone. There's a lot of stuff you could do with it, but Apple restricts you from doing anything with it they don't want you to do.

There's protecting people from shooting themselves in the foot, and then there's just being authoritarian. (Suddenly I'm starting to understand TigerJimmy's anti-socialism stance a little more.)

Gruber's argument basically hinges on "cross-platform apps suck". This may or may not be true, but it implies that apps developed using the official toolkit cannot suck.

I don't think you took away at all what the point of the Gruber article was. Apple is protecting the bottom line. Yes they have some standard as to the quality of their products and the quality by which their products are perceived due to third party software, but the bottom line is the bottom line. It's measured in dollars.

If you have the most popular platform, people will develop for it. If they're using specialty tools, it's going to make it more difficult to port as well as get the same experience elsewhere. If people are developing in Flash, the iPhone platform is nothing more than a commodity since you can run the same software elsewhere.

The thing Apple knows how to do above all else, is make money.

I wonder how much of this comes out of Steve's experience at NeXT. The 90's was full of attempts at cross platform solutions and cross architecture attempts, including things NeXT was driving, along with Sun and so forth. They all failed for the most part, sabotaged by companies like Microsoft (Java vs J++) and the general rise of Windows as the "standard".

*sigh*
And counterproductively, it's exactly this sort of petulance from Apple that makes it such a good idea to develop for Iphone by actually developing a cross-platform application using some kind of "intermediary translation or compatibility layer" -- even if merely a home-grown one -- as that means, if and when Steve goes "waah, waah" and throws you out of his pram, you haven't lost the whole project.

Peter

I wonder if this means it's "illegal" to use GLib, or some other convienience library. After all, it's an intermediary translation layer. For that matter, so is every function or method that you might write in XCode. And loops; loops are translation layers.

I expect somebody like Adobe to go out of their way to generate apps that, to an iTunes auditor, appear to be native. This will require generating a peculiar sort of "native" code, and may well perform quite well.

I wish Adobe luck with that. I don't, for a second, believe they can pull it off. I would in fact not expect them to try. That would simply be an obvious attempt to defy the letter and spirit of the licensing agreement. It would also be irresponsible of them to advocate that developers also break the licensing agreement by trying to publish the resulting programs.

For what it's worth:


May explain why this agreement is only for the 4.0 SDK, and not in the agreement for any of the 3.x releases. Apple could have made this apply to 3.x as well long ago.

That's, IMNSHO, bullshit.

Doesn't sound plausible to me either. Sounds like a "PR" reason, but not at what would have been discussed between the higher ups before this was pushed down into the agreement.

Quite. If you want to do deep inspection of the program to figure out what it's doing, surely you're better off starting with some sort of managed or byte-compiled code (e.g. .NET, Java, Flash, etc.)?

True, though with Cocoa's message passing structure Apple can spy on what the app is up to in a way that they couldn't do with your average bit of native compiled code.

Well, it looks like Jobs is revealing why:
http://gizmodo.com/5514300/steve-jobs-weighs-in-on-developer-agreement-drama

How long until Apple outlaws intermediate layers on MacOS?

Also, it's still a bullshit response; there are huge numbers of crappy apps on the iPhone already.

If they open their own app store, they can do whatever they want.

This all comes down to Adobe's actions and the hornet's nest they disturbed because Apple didn't want to ship flash on the iPhone. While Apple are being pretty heavy handed and inconsistent with regards to app approval and the like, this whole bruhaha over Flash and automatic app makers is 100% due to Adobe's childish and unprofessional actions. They've been hurting their customers for years and seem to have no plans to stop doing so.

And then how long until they decide that I can't install anything on my MacBook that doesn't come from there?


Which are?

Seems to me that Jobs is the one throwing a tantrum.

Adobe poked the bear. Now they're going to get the wrath.

You don't recall Adobe calling out Apple at every turn about Flash not being on the iPhone? It's not even been much of a back and forth, as primarily it's always just been Adobe doing the trash talking.

I don't agree with Apple's position regarding their SDK nor their approval process for their store. I'd be perfectly fine with them going over every program with a fine toothed comb if the App Store was only one way to get content onto your device - and not the only way.

But...

I agree with not having Flash on the platform. I've said it before, I hope it never comes to the platform in any way shape or form so long as Flash remains a proprietary technology. It's absolutely not needed for video and I'm glad the web presence of Mobile Safari is causing web publishers to examine how they're serving their visitors.

Adobe needs to jump ahead of the curve here and stop pushing an outdated technology and instead concentrate on creating new tools to support Flash-less web.

Adobe considers Flash to be an important product. Adobe spent time developing a version of Flash for the iPhone (and other mobile devices), something that consumers requested, frequently. Apple arbitrarily decided that they wouldn't allow it.

Consumers want Flash on their iPhones. Is it not right for Adobe to place the blame where it lies?

I fail to see how that's childish or unprofessional.

Jon Johansen (DVD Jon) responds. Amusing, at best.

iTunes for Windows actually is substandard, though, so it's not much of an ironic counterargument.

Do you seriously believe they would do this? They may want to, and are doing so on their new platform. But I don't think Apple is that stupid to shoot themselves in the foot with their computing platform. I accepted it on my mobile phone due to the advantages the iPhone has had, and I knew what it would mean when I bought the device. If they do the same on the computers though, I'd dump the platform along with a good portion of the rest of their users.


Adobe actually didn't consider Flash important until they found themselves on the losing side of the web battle against Macromedia. Adobe played a big part in trying to bring things like SVG to the web, but lacked the power to do so. Microsoft was asleep at the wheel after illegally capturing the majority of the web browser market, and showed no interest in pushing it forward. Adobe's answer was to buy Macromedia and have a change of heart about the best way to advance the web, helping to move the line back towards the proprietary and closed side. Apple may not be a saint here, but neither is Adobe.

As far as Apple's rejection of Flash, it wasn't arbitrary. They were clear from day one that no web plugins would be accepted on the platform. No Flash, no Shockwave, no Silverlight, no Quake Live plugin and so on. The Google Voice "not rejected but not accepted" issue was arbitrary.


This actually proves Job's point quite well too. iTunes feels like a slow, crappy piece of software on Windows. And it does on OS X as well, because it's hindered by trying to stay compatible on both platforms instead of taking advantage of newer improvements on both sides. iTunes for me on a Mac Pro can't handle playing back a video and an iPhone being connected. Quicktime X has no problems playing back many videos, while transcoding others.

I think irony is in the fact that being "sub-standard" should* not be a valid reason to prevent an application from existing on a specific platform, when instead it is the market that should* decide so.

*clearly this is what many - Apple for example - would disagree with.

Sadly enough - in my opinion - Microsoft seems to be planning to do the same with Windows Phone 7.

What Steve actually said, was:

The only important and relevant part of that, is the final phrase:

hinders the progress of the platform.

I'm familiar with that phrase already, from the Linux world. What it means, is that Steve wants native apps, where the iGadget is a full citizen target, rather than something written for some other system and then ported over.

I have apps on my Palm like that (ported over), and they stink.

But most importantly, Steve wants people developing for the iGadget, not merely porting generic apps from some other platform.

If the iGadget isn't the primary platform, then it becomes commoditized, and that's not something a hardware company looks forward to. Witness the IBM PC.

For better or worse, that's the issue here.

Cheers

They did? I wonder how it works when you can't install plugins for Mobile Safari.

Maybe Adobe should have spent time writing their own browser, using the built-in web kit, and stuff Flash into that? I think that would have had a more realistic shot at being approved. Crying because another vendor's app isn't designed to support your app is childish and unprofessional. So too is the way about which they did it.



Yes, we can see that by how poorly the iPhone and elated products have been selling. Consumers don't even know what Flash is, let alone "want" it. The only people that "want" flash are the people who need it as something to bitch, moan and whine about. Flash is irrelevant on the web. 95% of what it's used for can be done simpler and cleaner without it. I keep Flash off by default on my main systems. And I'm sending notice to news sites that still use it that they're going to lose a visitor if they don't stop posting content with it.

Mobile Safari does support plugins. You just can't get it installed without having a jailbroken or developer device. Somebody wrote one years ago that allowed you to download files to the local filesystem. The settings screen for Safari still has a toggle for plugins as well.

Flash is omnipresent in certain categories of products. Try visiting any car manufacturer's web site and it's a giant pile of Flash. Similar things happen on other luxury goods' manufacturer web sites (e.g., try looking around at nice Swiss watches).

Flash is also widely used in small but significant ways. Gmail uses Flash to implement it's file uploader. Gmail works fine without Flash, but it's better with Flash.

HTML5 is on its way to obsoleting Flash and I'll be the first one to bid it adieu, but Flash will still be around for several years, at a minimum.

(Grumpy old-timer rant: Java could well have served this purpose, but Flash was, for whatever reason, something that Microsoft has no problem with its becoming ubiquitous, and Flash had a decent graphics and rendering system when Java's was a bad joke. Would we be griping about Flash today if we replaced the word "Flash" with "Java" everywhere? Unclear.)

I think that's perfectly reasonable, or making an application that does nothing but play Flash applets.

But do you really think that Apple would approve that? They issued an edict that standalone apps made with Flash are "illegal". I can understand wanting to make sure that the available apps for your platform are good, especially since, since they're the only distributor of those apps, they bear Apple's imprimatur. But, (1) there are shitty iPhone apps now, and (2) why not decide on the basis of the app itself instead of some arbitrary precursor that has no real bearing? The only viable answer is that Apple doesn't really care about the things they've publicly stated; they just have a hard on for hating on Flash.

(Not that there isn't a reason to hate on Flash. It largely sucks. But, so far, all of the HTML5 implementations I've seen suck harder. At least it's an open standard.)


To my knowledge, they haven't done any such thing. They have complained that Apple has made an arbitrary decision to not allow any Flash-related anything on the iPhone.


Again, which way is that?

You don't need HTML5 to replace a large amount of Flash being used today. Simple HTML4, XHTML 1 and CSS can cover much of it. Javascript will cover more.

You want examples of what Adobe did? Use Google and find them. Adobe struck first.

Do you think for a second that Adobe didn't know Apple didn't want cross-developed apps on their app store? Adobe knew long before they ever tested Flash-anything on the iPhone that Apple wasn't going to ship it. They knew why Apple wasn't going to ship it. Apple and Adobe talk a lot. Adobe took it public to try and swing public favor in their own direction, trying to shame or otherwise push Apple.

I'm not trying to defend Apple's licensing agreement, I've already stated that the biggest motivator (and reason for maintaining this level of control) is MONEY. Talking about anything else, including sinister plots, jealousy or contempt for Adobe, etc. is just a complete waste of time. It's pure fantasy.

By the way, why hasn't Adobe release any version of Flash for any other mobile platform? Is Apple cock-blocking them there too? Why haven't they released a version of Flash for Mac OS (or Windows for that matter) that doesn't completely suck? Why can't they standardize the UI, including keyboard control between the apps that make up their Creative Suite? I mean, the apps have been shipping together in a bundle for over 6 years and it's still impossible to use them together seamlessly.

No developer is allowed to distribute ubiquitous system-level software for the iPhone. Adobe should get a pass on this? You have to know that if it was tied specifically to the browser the next complaint would be why other apps can't access it. They've had three years to release something stand-alone and instead they've done nothing. They've had three years to show Apple Flash running on another mobile platform. Instead... Nothing.

Apple is not the shiny example of the most moral or ethical company in the world, but Adobe isn't exactly blemish free either. Everything they've got has come through acquisition. And in many cases, the technologies were those they were trying to kill at one time (Flash being the most recent example).

Here, read this, it's decent: http://www.devwhy.com/blog/2010/4/12/its-all-about-the-framework.html




I steer clear of sites that rely on Flash. They're generally shite. The exact same story repeated - the same sites that likely required IE 4,5 and then 6 at one point in time.

If I were in an influential position at Apple, I would make sure the next version of Mac OS leaves out Flash by default as well. People would always be able to install it of course.


On a side note, looks like Palm is up for sale. Since their OS is completely browser-powered from a UI stand point, Adobe should just snap them up and release their own handsets where Flash is front and center. And the phones have 30 minutes of run time.

True, yet people are not clamoring for those flash applications. Dan's example of luxury brands' web sites is a good one, but that's not what people want.

People want Hulu, and the games over in the Timewasters thread, and other things, that require either Flash or HTML5 (or something beyond what Ajax can do).

Note that I'm not defending Flash; I still think it largely sucks. I'd rather see it disappear in favor of HTML5. And it will, eventually, as HTML5 support becomes ubiquitous on the desktop.

I think Apple's licensing terms are ridiculous, punitive, and overreaching. I think they deserve to be excoriated for it. Adobe also deserves to be excoriated for failing to make Flash consume huge amounts of memory for even the most trivial task, not opening the standard before they did and not opening it as much as it should be even now, and not being bothered to develop a mobile Flash until now.


No, it's not. If Apple doesn't want to allow direct access to private APIs, make them private. It should be easy enough to automate a tool to detect unauthorized access to those functions in a binary, and reject them if they do. That's perfectly reasonable. There are far more logical ways to do what Apple is claiming they want to do, but they don't want to do that. They want to block Flash. That guy is probably correct that they're far from sad about disabling the other cross-platform tools. But they didn't mind about them until Adobe was on the verge of releasing their tools.

You know what, though? I really don't care. I don't have an iPhone, nor am I likely to get one or develop for it. It's your inaccurate and relativist arguments that irritate me. I guarantee you that if Google had decided the exact same thing, you would claim that it was the worst possible move they could make and that it would destroy the company. In addition, I don't care about Apple's motivations. I care that it limits competition and innovation, and your apologia for it is equally as morally bankrupt.

Bitt, every time you have posted in the past few days you've failed to acknowledge what I've actually written. You take snippets out of context and you've tried to twist what I mean and have been saying all along. Further, you refer back to the link I posted, but show you've either not read the article or for some other reason want to misrepresent what it says.

Apple does have tools to identify private API calls BTW. What does that have to do with this discussion?

I've already stated more times than I can count that I do not agree with what Apple is doing with its licensing agreement. Why have you been trying to twist this around to say I'm apologizing for them? I've also already stated over and over (again) that I don't agree with how they've been handling the app approval process. Again, something you're trying to twist around. I think you're hell-bent on simply disagreeing with me, regardless of what I write. When it seems we're in agreement on some point, you try and tell me that I'm saying something different.

What pisses me off is Adobe and its employees acting with a smug air of entitlement that they deserve more than any other developer on that platform.

Had Google decided to not support Flash you'd have seen me support that decision. If Google had been running an app approval process with developer licensing agreements similar to Apple's, you'd have seen me criticize them, as I have Apple.

If you don't care about the platform, then why do you care that its lack of Flash, run-time interpreters and cross-compiled code "limits competition and innovation?" It seems to me that there already exists tremendous amount of competition on the iPhone platform as well as innovation. More so than on any other mobile platform to date in fact.

I'll ask again, why isn't there a huge uproar over the lack of Flash on every other mobile platform? Where are all the innovative interpreted and cross-compiled applications for other platforms? How are they defining and making those platforms the top of their classes?

At the end of the day, you know who will care about this? The people who enjoy debating it in the forums. 90+ percent of the iPhone buying public won't give a rat's ass and 90% of those people won't even know about this whole issue.

For the record, my opinion is:

Lack of Flash on iPhone: Good.
4.0 SDK licensing agreement: Bad.
Apple App approval process: Bad.

I'm going to clear this part up:


From that article:

If they're concerned about developers using private APIs, make sure that developers don't use private APIs; simple enough. Again, restricting compatibility layers because they might lead to poor apps is equivalent to outlawing hammers because you might kill someone with them. It's ridiculous and absurd, and most importantly, completely disingenuous. What happens when Adobe releases a product that takes Flash source as input and then produces XCode-compatible code as output?

But, beyond that, I'm done. You seem to be far more interested in business practices than technology or ethics, where as I couldn't care less. You're probably right that we're talking at cross purposes. I just can't fathom why anyone is interested in speculating about this MBA horse shit.

It seems you misunderstood what the article was referring to. Apple does police submitted apps for this stuff. Any such apps or app updates are denied if found to be using private APIs and frameworks. What the author was referring to are people who say Apple should allow developers to make calls through private channels and support those programs by not breaking them in future software updates (through changes to their private frameworks).



I'm not arguing this point. I've already said it's a dick move on their part and is definitely about their bottom line, not about the PR-cleansed reasons they've been giving. Apart of course from the private API/framework stuff, but that's only just been bought up because it was mentioned in that article I linked.



I'm interested in all of it. The least of which has anything to do with MBAs. While I don't agree with Apple in the SDK case, I don't believe it to be unethical. I do believe Adobe has acted unethically by trying to play the consumer against Apple in their spat.

This makes perfectly sense to me, much more than the post in dev/why? linked by Bruno.

Not being a developer, maybe I lack the specific knowledge to fully understand what the post at dev/why? says. But, if it is hard to maintain binary compatibility with flash layer - which, correct me if I am wrong, can itself be considered native - and consequently with all applications running on that layer, why would it be less difficult to maintain compatibility with hundred other native applications out there? What am I not understanding, or do I not know?

So far, if I get it right, it really seems to me that this is the same old strategic game of trying to make your proprietary technology a de-facto standard; strategy which is significantly compromised by any intermediary layer that allows an app to be developed for more than one OS and more than one hardware platform.

If you have a majority of apps dependent on a third-party framework then Apple is no longer free to update/innovate without consulting and likely being slowed down by that third party. It also means that Apple would have to work closer with that third party.

On the desktop, Apple doesn't really give a damn about an update breaking flash in your browser. But they do have to do a lot of regression testing against a lot of popular software. The argument is that perhaps they'd like this process streamlined on the iPhone.

It's sensible, but I still think it's more about not letting the platform become the commodity as both Mark and I have said before.

Somebody emailed Steve Jobs and asked whether iPhoneOS 4 would be coming out for the original iPhone and the answer was no.

Ok, so you too agree that there's no technical reason why Apple should worry about backwards compatibility with Adobe more than with any other native app producer.

As a matter of fact, it seems to me that one (I) may then argue that having to deal with more then one actor at every upgrade to make sure that all software already in the market works, is probably harder and less convenient than having to deal with ONE actor to gain compatibility with a number of applications.
So, Flash is really not providing backward compatibility issues here more than any other native product is.

Which is why



I too tend to agree on this.

Moreover, this is strategically (maybe not ethically) the right time to play the power game agains Adobe and others. iPhone is actually a big success NOW, regardless of Adobe and any other intermediate software layer producer, and iPad is reinforcing the platform market success; in a power game between Apple and Adobe (or any other), Apple definitely seems to me the prevailing one. My guess is that Apple wants to use its current market power (entirely independent from Adobe) to get rid of Flash and similar products now. Should they fail, they can alwways step back and eventually allow Flash and similar. But it is really a "now or never" situation.

I'll leave ethical considerations aside.

As a consumer, instead, I find this whole thing academically interesting - from a market analysis point of view - but I am not happy. Similarly, referring to Bitt's and Bruno's comment on Flash technology, I may agree that it's not technically / conceptually the best out there, and, in that respect, I may be ok that Apple's move may favour its extinction, hopefully, but not necessarily, in favor of some better one; still, I am not happy.
The reason being that today there are websites out there which rely largely on flash, and whether Bruno (just an example ) or Jane Smith or anyone else decide not to visit them is completely irrelevant to me: I may wanto or need to visit them, and I can't with the iPhone. So should I be looking for some handheld browsing experience, iPhone may not be the way to go for me.

All in all, this power game is not beneficial to me in the short run, and in the long run it's not going to necessarily be a good thing.

I am now just hoping that Windows Phone 7 includes/allows flash. I am sure Microsoft is watching this whole story with great interest, and I think that if Apple persists in moving against Adobe, MS will try a different strategy and allow flash and similar on their platform.
After all, Zune gave me a much better experience than iPod (even though I never even tried Zune HD), and it could very well be the same with Win Phone 7.

Will see...

No Flash on WIndows Phone 7.

If you want to see content on a site that uses Flash, write to the site's owners and/or developers to let them know that you're unhappy that you can't see their content. Many sites are already "getting it" and are starting to move to standards-based designs.

To be fair, it's not going to ship initially, but Adobe and Microsoft both have said they are working to make it happen. Of course as Bruno has already pointed out, no mobile platform has Flash today anyhow, just Flash lite and such.

One undiscussed thing that is in 4.0 that has me excited is IPv6. Hopefully this means that 4.0 will also bring in proper Back to my Mac support for the iPad. Would be nice to be able to access my home desktop from anywhere just like I can currently off a Mac laptop.

Oh, boy... Rumors are that Adobe is going to sue Apple. Just over what remains unclear.

It would be amusing to see Apple drag this one out until Adobe executives are forced to sell lemonade on the streets to make cash to pay their lawyers.

Maybe Apple will just buy them out and kill Flash once and for all. Stranger things have happened. It's certainly no more absurd than Adobe suing Apple - in fact it actually makes some sense and would both expand and compliment Apple's software lineup nicely.

"Very nice software lineup you have there. I particularly like the things."

What I'd love to see Apple sued over is their misappropriation of trademarks and their use of App Store approval as leverage in extortion against app developers to get them to change app names and/or company names (especially when said companies/products pre-date Apple's own marks and/or usage of marks)

Two recent ones have come to light. ContactPad and journalPad. I'd not have used a capital "P" in those names myself, but that's beside's the point. It's not like they're named iPadContact or iPadJournal.

I suppose cupertino doesn't give a shit about products like Notepad or TextPad or probably a few hundred others that predate even the earliest dreams of Apple's use of the word "pad."

Again, just more examples of the app store approval process sucking. Both the denied apps are available in the store, having been approved earlier - but their updates are getting denied based on their names. Nice.

Indeed. ...or I may use a nettop, or a laptop, or a desktop.

But that's not the point I was making, tough. One less feature in a device is one less feature, and that's the bottom line today.
Should that bring to a "better future" I may be ok with it, somehow, but even that is uncertain.

Flash is a third party program. It is not available on a full version for any system other than FUll Mac OS or WIndows installations.

Flash missing from the iPhone is a total and complete non-issue because no other handset has it either.

Flash missing from the iPad is equally a non-issue because there are no other tablet products available that compare to the iPad. No one is going to buy a nettop instead of an iPad. They're not at all comparable. It's like saying I'm going to buy a a nettop instead of a phone. A nettop is just a cheap (as in quality) notebook. People haven't been buying them instead of Mac notebooks either.

I don't see the logic of your above statement.

I'd love to have an Empeg Mark III, but the oportunity is not there. Do I stop wanting it - or does it become a "total and complete non-issue" - because no competitor in the market has any similar device either?

I read you underline that competitors don'r have Flash either. But the point we are discussing here is that iPhone could have had it, but this oportunity for consumers is missed - and more importantly, the oportunity of having similar (possibly better) technology on it -. This is a fact.
Whether or not it is for you a non-issue is subjective and I fully respect it, but remains irrelevant to those who have other needs from their portable devices and could have benefited from the "banned" technology.

*massive edit*
Forget it, I'm not getting back into this crap.

I love my netbook, and they have nothing to do with the argument you were making, you just called them out for no reason, Bruno. Although, I can't say I'm surprised that you were parroting Steve Jobs.

ps- the correct term is netbook. nettops are different.

A nettop is a small form factor desktop PC (Dell Zino, e.g.). A netbook is a small notebook.

And, while they're often cheap, they're not all low quality. I bought a netbook instead of a Mac notebook, because it does everything I need it to, and it's cheaper, and the quality's good enough.

Some people choose not to buy Apple products. This doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with these people. Get over it.

Please be courteous enough to read the other messages in the thread before seeking out only to disagree with mine. I was replying to taym, Matt. I wouldn't otherwise have brought up nettop nor netbooks. You're right, they have nothing to do with the iPad, and that's what I was saying to taym.

BTW, why is it that I'm seeing so much selective reading here? I'm critical of Apple every week. Critical of Jobs by extension and directly just as often. Seems like those are just convenient to skip over. I don't have a hate-on for any particular brand, while I see plenty of "It's Apple therefore I'm against it" in here all the time.

With the iPad specifically I knew I didn't want one for myself but I knew the product would take off nonetheless. With regards to the features in iPhone OS 4, I knew a while back that some of the rumored features were coming. I also knew that Apple would mess something up (I've already mentioned some of the stuff that's dropped off the face of the earth from the shipping iPad OS 3.2 and beta 4.0).

There's nothing wrong with anyone for making a purchase decision. But no one is seriously weighing in on the iPad versus something else. There are no comparable products on the market. That's what some people need to get over. Stop trying to convince the world that "X" or "Y" cheap netbook is an alternative and just accept the fact that the product brings to the table a complete platform that has not previously existed and that a lot of people are legitimately interested in.

Both product classes can exist. They're not mutually exclusive. Someone in the market for a $40 steak doesn't go buy a BigMac instead. Likewise, someone seriously looking at a $500 to $800 tablet isn't in the market for a $200 netbook.

Anyway, can I get back to taym now?

The logic is that people will compare features of similar products when making purchasing decisions. No one is going to see missing Flash as a negative against the iPhone and a plus for another handset. The point is moot in that regard. We're not talking about wanting non-existing products.



But it could not have had it. The iPhone does not have any third party software pre-installed. Apple controls the whole software stack. So, unless Adobe were to open source the whole of Flash or give or sell Flash to Apple, there was no way it was ever going to be on the iPhone. So I suppose there is that slim fantasy-level chance. But I consider that a "no" because it's not at all realistic.

While some people may have considered it an "opportunity," some would have considered it a negative. Imagine wasting even more bandwidth while surfing to view mostly ads... That's what the majority of Flash content is, especially on the sites you'd want to visit with a small screened device. So there are people on both sides, keep that in mind.

The bottom line is clearly that Flash is not a deciding factor in the purchase decisions of consumers and is not holding back the sales of anyone's handset products. Look at the sales rates and numbers.



I'm not sure what this has to do with Flash. The browser on the iPhone is already one of the best, if not the best mobile browsers available and includes the same (or at least very similar) HTML5 and CSS support as the desktop version of Safari, along with a lean and fast Javascript interpreter.



But you misunderstand. My statement is completely objective. I don't care to factor in my own personal wishes into the observation. I'm looking at what the market is saying. And the market is saying that it doesn't care about Flash. The only noise about Flash is in tech blogs and techy forums. Some of it spills into mainstream media as an anecdote but nothing more. Look at all the sites transferring their content delivery away from Flash - why? Because the iPhone platform is building significant momentum and installation footprint that it matters to those sites to be able to reach that audience.



I'm not arguing that some people would not like Flash or may find use and benefits for it. I'm just saying that it has not made a difference to the product's acceptance and the platform's take-up (iPhone, iPod and now iPad).

The vast majority of people have spoken with their wallets. The iPlatform without Flash is a hit.

I said I was going to stay out of this, but I just want to add a few points. (Also, my head is no longer close to exploding. I discovered how to triple my productivity.)


They may in a few months. Until then, the knowledge that another handset may support Flash and that the iPhone definitely never will might influence people.


If a web page embeds a PDF, what happens? I've not used an iPhone enough to know personally, but I'm guessing that it opens an external application. Why would that not work for embedded Flash applets? Or is Mobile Safari so closed that it cannot deal with any objects it doesn't have preexisting knowledge of?


By any metric, the vast majority of Flash content is video. Yes, many video sites are transitioning to HTML5, but that involves a lot of transcoding of source material that's not in a codec that HTML will handle (Sorenson Spark, mostly), and YouTube, which has a dedicated application on both Android and iPhone, hasn't done that yet, to the point that a large portion of their videos (personal anecdotal evidence) won't play on those devices, even with their dedicated applications. And forget about any other video site. A few have made some minor inroads into converting to HTML5, but Hulu, for example, hasn't, and probably never will. There are not enough restrictions on how the content can be played back for them to be able to switch. And that discounts any Flash animation, which, as far as I'm aware, is completely unsupported by any mobile device. It's doubtful that many, if any, would make a smartphone choice based on whether they could watch HomestarRunner or not, but I think all would agree that would rather have the opportunity than not.


Assuming that's true, which is debatable, that means that any product that consumers aren't interested in shouldn't be allowed to reach market. Yeah, okay, maybe consumers aren't interested. If they're not, then the product would fail on its own. If they are, then Apple is restricting the market. Besides, people make uninformed decisions all the time. I'm sure that there are a variety of people out there for whom Android would work better (say, people who are drenched in the Google Kool-Aid), but they got the iPhone anyway, because it was the one that everyone else had. Bandwagonism is a strong marketing force.

Ultimately, the arguments that are being made are "iPhone plus Flash is better than iPhone without Flash". Your argument is that "iPhone without Flash is better than iPhone with Flash". I think that's demonstrably untrue. This implies that applications that would have been made via Flash will instead be made via XCode, and that a bad application is worse than no application. You can make those arguments, but they are, at the very least, debatable.


Other than Doug's semi-facetious "it's not what I'm used to, therefore it's bad" posts, this is untrue. TonyC and I are probably your most vocal adversaries, and we both use MacBookPros as our everyday workstations. Others simply state "Apple is not for me". There are people who hate on Apple, but I'm not aware of any of them here.

The problem is that you see this where it doesn't exist. I think the iPad is a stupid device, and I think that refusing to support, nay, allow, Flash is a bad choice for users, at least in the short term. Further, it sets a bad precedent for other future technologies, and marks the iPhone as a closed platform even more so than we already knew. But that doesn't mean that I hate all things Apple, and the fact that you see that where it doesn't exist is far more indicative of fanboyism than a lack of criticism. (Do you love your wife unreservedly? Do you ever disagree with her? If so, disagreement does not imply lack of obsession.)

Bitt, you're still trying to put words into my mouth and that's what I (always) have the biggest problem with.

For me personally, iPhone OS without Flash is better than with Flash. Same as Mac OS. But that's not what I'm trying to extend universally and not at all what I've been saying in this thread. I'm taking myself out of the equation and talking strictly of public acceptance of the (i)platform.

You can debate all you want, but the market has already shown that Flash does not matter. If it did, to even half the degree you seem to go on about, then the lack of Flash would be on the average consumer's tongue and it would be affecting the sales of Apple's iPhone OS based products. Those products are selling like hot-cakes to Mac users and non-Mac users alike.

I'm not here to argue. Frankly, I'm all for a good debate, but none of this is debatable. It's all moot. The fact of the matter is that Apple decides what they want on their platform. And the fact is that the market is eating it up. There's nothing to argue about there.

Remember, I'm not saying that an iPhone with Flash would do any worse in the market. Debatable is whether the iPhone would have even higher sales figures with Flash.

Now, if you want to argue the merits of Flash, that's something else entirely. Frankly, not something I'm very interested in. You might want to argue about WHY Apple doesn't have Flash, and that I've already commented on numerous times - mostly ignored with a few exceptions.

Here are some mistakes in your last post.... Hulu is coming to the iPad and iPhone with a dedicated app. Whether or not Hulu has much longevity is truly debatable. The iPad may save them, because things haven't been looking so hot for them. Also Hulu is US-only, so for many people it's irrelevant.

A lot of video served using Flash is encoded in H.264, the same codec used in the HTML5 standard video tag..

Flash video represents the majority of Flash content only on video-service sites. Everywhere else it's ads. Period. Full stop.

At the top of your post you said that "in a few months" other phones will support Flash. I normally interpret "a few" to mean 3, so we'll first see if Flash is available in full at that time on other handsets (I won't hold my breath) and then how that affects the public's buying patterns.

Here are my predictions. Flash will not be available in 3 months. When it is available, it won't be installable on many handsets, including Android sets it's supposed to be designed for. Android 2.1 (latest release, but hardly new) won't be available on some handsets until the end of the year, Windows Phone 7 which ships at the end of the year won't have Flash either. Flash performance is going to be shite on these platforms. Flash interaction is going to be crap as well and you'll see a lot of frustrated complaints. Lastly, once all these other handsets have Flash, iPhone is still going to whip them in the market. "Has Flash support" is pretty much a wasted bullet point in a commercial. Ask any of your non-techy friends what they think about Flash.

In fact, if Microsoft is smart, they won't allow Flash on Windows Phone 7 at all. At least not if they want to build out their native application list. My advice to Adobe is to start and/or continue working on standards-based tools and frameworks - CSS, SVG (hey Adobe, remember SVG?), HTML5 (et al.) and Javascript. A bunch of Flash can be run via Javascript as has been already demonstrated.

Here's another interesting read (obvious to some ppl): http://iansamuel.com/essays/progress-of-the-platform/

We've covered this before a little bit in the old "iSlate" thread (oddly I can't link to the threaded view), but as a refresher, the iPhone allows any app to register and be called by another one, including from Safari. They can register as a handler for an entire domain (IE, Apple has a Gallery app that can run when visiting http://gallery.me.com), or to handle a file type. As for your specific PDF question, they just open in the browser, since OS X is PDF based. It will also open .doc, and other MS Office formats without any 3rd party software.

Adobe could go the route of making a flash player for the phone as a standalone app, but the issue would be how web sites handle it. Since it wouldn't be installed as a plugin, websites may just display the "download flash player" button, instead of sending down the swf. I'm also not sure how Actionscript is handled, it may come afoul with the SDK agreement.


Sorenson Spark was the default in Flash 6 (2002) and 7 (2003). 8 (2005) moved to VP6 by default, and 9 update 3 (2007) moved to H.264 by default. Most of the big video sites are on Flash 9 at least.

Bitt didn't say that Hulu wouldn't come to iPhoneOS, he said that they were unlikely to be able to move to HTML5 as it makes it hard/impossible for them to restrict distribution of the content.

True enough. Harder it may be, because they'd have to come up with something new. Not however impossible. Likewise, serving up their video wrapped in Flash doesn't make it copy-proof either. Far from.

I can appreciate Hulu trying to keep content owners happy, but they must know that's a false security. TV episodes can be downloaded the same night they air, or earlier, elsewhere. In higher quality and at a faster rate. All that said, they'd be able to have much better security with their own software rather than relying on Flash through a browser. I don't however have any insight into what they're going to do with their own app.

I think the biggest concern for Hulu is what happens when they start charging for content? Much more significant than whether or not they'll move to serving video without Flash.

How exactly are they supposed to add any protection, besides restricting by IP address, to an HTML5 streamed video ?

True.

Yeah. You can't do much. The BBC had this problem when they implemented iPlayer for iPhones/iPods and it was defeated in minutes. Check it is a UK IP. Check that user agent matches something iPhoneish. Check that you've got a cookie from the iPhone version of the iPlayer website. Check that the request has the quirky ranges that only the QuickTime player on the iPhone gives.

YouTube alone has somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million videos. You think there are that many flash ads? (Honestly, I can't say; I got tired of dealing with animated gifs and javascript nonsense ages ago and installed an ad blocker. I do recall a few Flash ads before then. Anecdotally, my AdBlock logs would seem to indicate that it's blocked something in the neighborhood of 40 pieces of Flash in the same time that it's blocked thousands of other ads. To be fair, some of those other ones may have contained Flash once they were loaded.)

And I love how you dismiss entire hugely popular segments of the Internet because, I guess, if you include them it doesn't fit your argument.

That doesn't really make any difference, though. If a user wants to view something available only in Flash, it doesn't make any difference that it can also provide things he doesn't want. This is true of any medium. The US Mail provides both paychecks and ads. Do you want to stop getting your paycheck because you don't want any ads? (Yes, I know that's an antiquated example, but it still speaks to my point.)


Yes, it is. And a lot is not. H.264 support wasn't added to Flash until 2007. YouTube started in late 2005. That's two years, and probably more, worth of Flash video that wasn't in H.264. It's reasonably easy to stumble across videos that still aren't available in it. YouTube's HTML5 opt-in silently falls back to Flash when this is the case.


No, it has not. A choice between a product that doesn't contain Flash and another product that doesn't contain Flash is not any sort of proof about anything Flash-related. Get back to me in <x amount of time> (wouldn't want to imply a specific amount of time in my general speakings about the future. And "x" does not equal ten.) when Flash has become available on some other phone. You'll probably be right then.

But, once again, I don't care about the market. The market is not God. I care about choice. Apple has seen fit to limit the choices of its users. You agree that the license is bad, you agree that the app approval is bad, but some how those two bads add up to a good, as long as it restricts Flash. Or maybe that's not what you're saying. I don't know. I don't think I even care anymore.


If so, it's only because your fingers flap on the keyboard, but you aren't saying anything. You don't even respond to point-blank questions. You just respond and nit-pick at irrelevancies.


Well, that's a thrilling conversation. The iPhone sells well. That's a shocker. Who cares? Is Flash on another platform likely to make people switch? No. But some folks will be annoyed when they realize that folks with that other phone, whatever it is, can do something that they want to do that they can't.

Anyway, I'm really done this time. It's just pointless. I shouldn't have let myself get sucked up into this again. Trying to respond to your amorphous "arguments" is like trying to grab smoke out of the air; I just end up twisted in knots, not knowing which way is up. I'd really rather you didn't respond to point out that you don't get US Mail because you're Canadian, or whichever other trivial irrelevancy you want to prattle on about. I still have a desire to defend myself, and it's going to make my eye twitch to ignore it.

BItt, you're failing to see the point and I'm not sure you have one of your own but to say that Apple is somehow cheating you (or other consumers) by not offering Flash.

Why on earth would you add up all of YouTube's video and use that as a counter example against my point? YouTube is ONE site. It doesn't matter how many terabytes of video they have. It represents ONE use of Flash, which I mentioned, a video-service site. The majority of Flash usage, OTHER than for video-service sites, is for ads. Popular video service sites are all making or will be making their content accessible without Flash. Not all of them use Flash now and not all of them have ever used Flash. Apple's site has never used Flash for its video. None of the porn sites I visit stream video in Flash either.

Apple however are not limiting choice. It's your choice to buy or not to buy one of their products. You may want a notebook in Farrari red. Tough cookies if you also want it to be a MacBook.

The market is not important to you. It's important to Apple. It's important to every company big or small. It's the only metric that's measurable relating to what we're discussing. If you have never worked for yourself then I suppose you might not be ready to accept this reality.

Your line of arguing is wearing thin on me and I'm done responding to your points because they're not relevant to what I've been talking about. If you want a different type of argument, you should look for the next room over. But you interjected into a discussion that was ongoing to try and push some agenda of "choice" that has no bearing on anything but trying to dismiss Apple as too controlling. I've already said I agree with you there, they're controlling, and often, too controlling.

The iPhone is going to fail because it doesn't have Flash. I'll record that for later reference...

It's not Flash that restricts access to Hulu.com to US residents, so any failures of this aspect exist now as well with Hulu or any other site.



I'm not sure exactly what Hulu has deployed in its streams, but generally speaking, Flash is only going to stop someone from directly saving (downloading) the content. Are their streams even encrypted?

Without Flash, one could create a Javascript player to accomplish a similar feat. Without anything fancy like encryption or purging the playback buffer, it would be as trivial to save the streamed video file as it would with Flash.

Moving to a paid model, Hulu will want to deploy something new anyway. We'll have to see how it all plays out. Hulu may not be able to make the transition at all.

Yeah. The Flash player just stops you from downloading and saving the content. The server side would be the part that refuses to let you stream if you're outside whatever country boundary that it cares about.

Flash has something called SWF Verification to try to ensure that you're using whatever is the legitimate Flash SWF player for that site is though. The BBC enabled it for their Flash based iPlayer.

Was the market (provided one defines a segment of it accurately enough to make such statement) complaining about the lack of portable MP3 players that could host thousands of tracks?
No.
Then the iPod is released to the general public and it becomes a success.

So, besides the fact that you don't hear people complain, what data do you have to say that the market (again provided you define this clearly) would not appreciate Flash and prefer not having it over having it?
Clearly this is retorical. There's no such undebatable data. In fact, there are people in the market, - that is, it exists a market segment - who prefer the iPhone with FLASH or with similar technologies.

The proof is easily found: >> I << exist And, it seems, few others in this board. And, I think I am safe in saying that there are people out there who prefer being able to use YouTube than not being able to. They are in the "market", and form a market segment that Apple is pleasing less that it could.

This is simple. All other arguments are indeed interesting, but, again, unrelated to what stated above and previously by me.

It does not mean the iPhone will fail as a product. It does not mean I hate you either: I don't! . It simply means I am less happy with an Apple product than how I could have been, and others like me.


- The "market" as you call it is a collective, and should be treated statistically. Statistics describes groups, not individuals, and by selecting individuals you can form different groups: there are market segments that don't match you description of "market" and who are less happy without flash than with it.

- "People" will compare similar products only if you define as "people" the group of those who would do so. I would not. I am speaking precisely of the fact that Product A would have been better if...

- "People" will not find Flash as a factor pro-purchase only if you define "people" as those who would not.
I, instead, don't particularly like browsing on mobile devices. I find it ineffective most of the time, unpleasant, often frustrating just because of the screen size. Knowing that I will ALSO deal with several incompatibility issues, I am definitely not tempted to buy any mobile device to browse the internet. Still, IF I knew that I would have a full featured browser, be it IE, FF, Safari, as powerful as that in a desktop, then I may be thinking about such thing. I promise. I am talking about myself. I know.
The iPad itself, as a concept, would be more appealing to me. Todsay, crazy as I may sound, believe me I'd rather spend three times as much a get a Tablet with Windows 7 or any other "full" OS.
So, yes, it is for me a factor that contributes to determine whether I'd buy the iPad or not.

Any OTHER point is interesting, here, but this is the one I made when I said that as a consumer I am not happy. It's really simple and does not imply anything it does not say explicitly.

Taym, for the most part I do agree with you.

I'd never argue that you shouldn't want Flash or anything else on the iPhone or any other product. Your desires aren't "wrong." I simply stated that the lack of Flash was not holding back the iPhone nor is it holding back the iPad. In the grand scheme of things, Flash is but a small element of existing web sites, web browsing is a small part of these devices and compared to the whole of the potential of the iPhone and iPad, Flash is but a microscopic portion of what the device can/could/will do for the most part.

There will always be a few people that would use a device like the iPad to exclusively browse a Flash interface (such as a kiosk use) but really that's an extremely niche scenario. I've said before (many many times) that the iPad makes an amazing platform for vertically-oriented tools. But Apple have always been about the widest possible reach with their consumer products. It does mean they usually miss a number of specialized elements. It took a while to get Copy and Paste, now Multi-tasking. Both of those are infinitely more important than Flash IMO. I think to most other customers as well.

Apple pretty much single-handedly established the portable MP3 market. This doesn't really translate to a comparison with the lack of Flash on current products. The iPod was missing (and is still missing) certain features. None of those, like Flash on today's products, have held back its success as a product.

YouTube and other sites are viewable on the iPhone and iPad. Such sites are more usable on these devices than other handsets and similar products, what with specialized apps and all.

If you want a Windows 7 tablet, then go out and buy one now. Windows tablets have existed for years. That's not what the iPad is. Once you've used a device designed for touch input you will see how misguided and ill-conceived the idea of tablet products running a desktop OS are.

You're not alone here. There are plenty of people out there that want a full OS on a tablet device. Just not enough people to matter it seems. It's why that product segment has done atrociously over its lifetime. They've been trying for a long time too - what, 8 years now?

Microsoft understood "touch" as evidenced by their Surface project/product. But they've been unable or unwilling to do anything with it in the consumer space, excepting Zune to a small degree. Windows has been holding Microsoft back and the Windows-everywhere mentality is what's set them up for the back-seat position (in terms of innovation especially) in the 21st century.

Really? Maybe I've been too busy playing all the fun little Flash games to notice the ads.

http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-cs5-and-iphone-applications/

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.