Apple v Adobe: ‘About to get uglier’
p2pnet view Off Topic:- “To my knowledge, Apple controls the entire source code to the iPhone OS”, John Gruber posted in DaringFireball in January.
“That’s not to say they wrote the whole thing from scratch”, he went on. “Many low-level OS components are open source. But they have the source. If there’s a bug, they can fix it. If something is slow, they can optimize or re-write it. That is not true for Mac OS X, and Flash is a prime example. The single leading source of application crashes on Mac OS X is a component that Apple can’t fix.”
Now, Apple’s “iron-bound determination to keep Adobe Flash out of any iWhatever device” is “about to blow up in Apple’s face”, reckons SJVN in IT World.
“Sources close to Adobe tell me that Adobe will be suing Apple within a few weeks”, he states, going on:
“Officially, Adobe‘s not talking about such actions, but there’s no question that Adobe is ticked off big time at Apple. I mean how often in print does one company representative say about a former partner, “Go screw yourself Apple,” as Lee Brimelow, an Adobe platform evangelist, did on his personal Web site, The Flash Blog.”
Adobe “had him retract some of his words, and the blog now has a big disclaimer”, says IT World, continuing >>>
For now, Adobe spokesperson Wiebke Lips maintains that “We are aware of the new SDK language and are looking into it. We continue to develop our Packager for iPhone OS technology, which we plan to debut in Flash CS5.” Flash CS5, which is part of Adobe Creative Suite 5, arrived on April 12th, but, at this point, it can’t be used to create i-device applications.
Indeed, the net effect of Apple’s licensing change, according to John Gruber of Daring Fireball, is to make it impossible to use cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe’s upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch — a tool that compiles C# and .NET apps to the iPhone.” In other words, Adobe, Microsoft, not only can you not have Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight running natively on an iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad, you can also forget about creating an iWhatever program that can get around that requirement.
Adobe, the king of Internet video with 95% Web browser market penetration, is not one bit happy about being locked out of Apple’s lucrative mobile device market. Novell’s MonoTouch group is “reaching out to Apple for clarification on their intention, and believe there is plenty of room for course-correction prior to the final release of the 4.0 SDK.” Adobe, which doesn’t want to let go of its hold on Internet-based video, isn’t anything like as optimistic.
“It’s not going to be pretty”, adds SJVN in IT World.
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April 16th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
This battle of wills has certainly been entertaining to watch since it started, not just between Apple and Adobe, but also between fans/users. Personally I’m not a user of any Apple products, though I may buy an iPod for the wife as a birthday present at the end of the year. Even though I don’t really care about Apple and do like most of Adobes products, I have to side with Apple on this one. Some of their motivation is obviously geared towards protecting the profitability of iTunes, but that isn’t evil. I suppose this could be considered anti-competitive, maybe. Given Apples product range, I do think they are right in wanting to control as much as possible. They have always done this and is the foundation for a good user experience when using Apple products, so it is nothing new really. Flash can be a good choice for the creation of certain kinds of content, I won’t argue with that. The big downside is it’s prevalence and how everyone with a PC is pretty much required to install Adobes plug-in in order to surf the net properly. Being closed source, only they know absolutely everything it does behind the scenes. It has proven itself time and again to be both a potential security/privacy risk as well as buggy. Adobe is very slow to fix its problems, often prompting me to wonder if they really care at all. This has been its main drawback for ages now, so I have to admit I wasn’t really surprised when this whole Apple vs Adobe thing started. I would prefer an open source solution if one exists or can be created, or at least some personal choice. Remember PDF and how synonymous it used to be? It has been a very long time since I used to have to install Adobe Reader, another buggy (not to mention very bloated and slow) piece of software that nobody liked. Nowadays we have other choices and I don’t miss it at all. Even so, the format itself still persists and hasn’t died. No doubt the transition away from Flash will suck for web developers, and especially Adobe, but in the end it will have been a good thing for everyone else. Having more options always is and internet standards have always focused on being open, have they not? Like PDF, people will still use Flash. It just won’t be a requirement anymore, but optional instead.