<<The claws are out. Adobe’s Platform Evangelist, Lee Brimelow retaliated today against Apple blocking Flash developers on the iPhone with a post on his Flash Blog.>>
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/09/adobe-go-screw-yourself-apple-2 |
Oh, teh drama! ;-))
Frankly, however, what else was to be expected rherotical q. Apple is building up a global content-sales ecosystem designed around its (in reality: misnamed) iPhone OS, and fellow devices[*].
Part of that goal is ensuring –beyond the call of self-defined duty– that third-party apps allowed into the corral be of top build, safety and dependability. Above all, such apps need to behave at the top of their parametric abilities (instant event response; UI-consistency across the board; etc) or else they risk tarring the entire ecosystem. And it's not as if Apple has forbidden anyone to develop for it – only that whatever is being assembled doesn't depend on what they consider to be inferior, unreliable tools (especially the low-level software libraries; inferior to native libs). You want to become iPhone OS app author, go learn the lingo. It's not as if Adobes (and Microsoft's) cross-platform devtools were capable of generating truly iPhonian content, rather than approximations of same-old, same-old....
Apple has invested heavily in automated tools for checking apps submitted to the AppStore – which can but rely on known code entry points and libraries. Were they to abandon that compliance requirement, and let apps be created by any development framework out there (something that'd please FSF, Adobe, and all the world's would-be hackers), they'd soon find it impossible to check submitted object code for proscribed APIs, etc. simply because of sheer number of alternative ways and means of writting code. For more on the background, read (and rejoyce!) this enlightening piece by John Gruber:
http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331
[^*] an ecosystem in which I personally believe a proto-iPad was thought up before any pocket gizmos but consciously pushed aside until more instantly understandable cellphone has carved a sizeable market segment necessary for its survival, and into which the more [r]evolutionary of the two could later be "slotted in." |
[...] Back to the subject matter: linked-to by Gruber is this pretty prescient observation from elsewhere:
» […] Adobe's Flash compiler is a classic maneuver to "commoditize your complements," […] Apple don't want to be commoditized, especially if it means having apps that don't take advantage of the iPhone's strengths.
Adobe want to lock developers into Flash and commoditize everything else as Flash-delivery devices. Apple want to commoditize applications and lock developers into their APIs. «
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250946 |
