iPad

[Samwise]

I like Steve's quote yesterday about how Android has porn apps, and how will you protect the kids.  Like the kids can't already go to iphone porn websites and such...

Really?  What a douche.

[Quinton]

I'm moderately offended at Steve's little digs -- they're kinda tacky.  But on the other hand, he didn't seem to think we were even worth snarky comments a year or two ago, so maybe I should be flattered.

Also, I wonder if we're going to see any "omg ip*d fragmentation!" stories, pointing out that the new multitasky (well, kinda!) OS 4.0 won't run on ipad until this fall and will never run on iphone, iphone 3G, and the older ipods.  I expect not, since when Apple shits on their developers and inconveniences their users it can only be a good thing ^^

[Jeff Kelly]

(...) to expect adobe to dump huge amounts of cash to an OS that makes up a tiny 4% of total users in the world is, well just silly, even if they are addressing the issue. Especially when that OS simply refuses to give hardware support, one of the main components to flash video in HD resolutions.

This is exactly what's is the problem with flash today and why so many people despise it.

Adobes platform support for flash is only good on Windows. The rest is royally fucked because they either don't have any flash support or an excrutiatingly bad one.

Linux doesn't have a tiny 4% market share. It does if you only count intel compatible desktop computers. If you count every internet enabled Linux powered device then the market share is huge.

So far more than 10 Million Android devices have been sold, Linux powered devices twice as much (in 2008 and 2009 alone)

Mac OS doesn't have a tiny 4% market share. It does if you only count desktops. So far more than 85 million iPod touch and iPhones have been sold and already more than 500.000 iPads.

Some 200 million symbian powered devices have been sold in 2008/2009

If you count smart phones and internet enabled devices more than 90% of the market doesn't use windows at all and even windows mobile doesn't support flash.

The majority of the devices mentioned above are fully capable of displaying SD or even HD video but can't because there is no flash support for those platforms and there likely never will be.

One or two years from now nobody will care if flash is well supported on the desktop version of Windows because they will be accessing the internet from devices powered by Symbian OS, iPhone OS, Android OS or some Linux derivative or even Window sPhone 7 (also no flash support) many already do so today.

All of those devices will use a browser engine capable of rendering HTML 5.

If Adobe wants Flash to stay relevant THEY NEED to support flash on most of those platforms because in the forseeable future those will be the main source of internet access for many people.

So far they aren't even able to support Flash on a single platform in a sensible way

[Quinton]

Adobe's actively working to make flash work well on Android -- I know this firsthand.  I cannot believe they would not dedicate the same or greater effort to Steve's platform that has even greater market share than ours.  Hell they've got so far as to build tools to compile flash content to native code when they got the cold shoulder from Steve, which now Apple is introducing new language in their SDK license to ban.

Flash certainly has plenty of baggage, but trying to pretend the issue here is solely Adobe's, in face of the facts at hand, seems silly to me.

Fun commentary on the SDK "no languages but those that Steve blesses" business: http://joeberkovitz.com/blog/2010/04/08/apple-takes-stance-on-consciousness/

One commentor speculates interestingly:

MPO is that this is not aimed at Adobe or any tool-maker. Instead, Apple wants to have complete control of the output of developers’ time if they are engaged in producing iPhone apps. The part that bothers them is that, if they decide not to put your app on the store or pull it, that you’re not completely sunk. You can take that same code and compile it for PC, Android, or whatever.

I think anyone investing any time in making iPhone apps right now is nuts. They get to decide if your work is saleable at all, and can change that decision at any time.

[Mrbloodworth]

(...) to expect adobe to dump huge amounts of cash to an OS that makes up a tiny 4% of total users in the world is, well just silly, even if they are addressing the issue. Especially when that OS simply refuses to give hardware support, one of the main components to flash video in HD resolutions.

This is exactly what's is the problem with flash today and why so many people despise it.

Adobes platform support for flash is only good on Windows. The rest is royally fucked because they either don't have any flash support or an excrutiatingly bad one.

Seems to be some confusion here. When I hear you say "Flash", I take it you mean browsers and traditional computers. When I hear people say Linux, it means usually means vanilla. I would point to the hardware of those devices before I would point to the flash player itself, because when you say flash, and then Linux based, its not a problem of support, its a problem of speed and speed is directly tied to the players access to the devices hardware. It has been a long time since flash was completely CPU bound. I linked a adobe solution in my last post that has now been outright banned by apple. So, to say that they do not offer solutions, or are not considered is a bit dishonest. There are so many initiatives over at adobe to adopt flash to mobile devices (Past present and future), its scary. This includes the Flash Lite player, that was released in 08, that does indeed work on Symbian. The main issue is, hand devices tend to use some flavor of Linux, Linux has bottlenecks in allowing flash (and AIR) accesses to hardware. So its odd to default to saying this is all adobes fault.

More reading for you. Mobile & Devices Developer Center

My personal fear, and what is scary to me, is the constant attempt to fall back on java script, and java.

[Tarami]

Well, all I can say is: imagine what it'd sound like if Microsoft enforced policies like Apple's.

[Quinton]

Interestingly, even at the height of their power, Microsoft never managed to treat their developers or customers as badly as Apple does.  Their competitors?  Well that's another story.

EDIT: grammar

[Mrbloodworth]

I am trying to imagine where apple would be right now with out the adobe suite of products.

[Engels]

Well, personally, I think Apple might think its being a clever pants, and in this moment of heady exuberance, it may seem like the path to global domination, but there's a good reason MS has a foothold in computing market-share -- people can write apps for it with a wide array of languages and tools.

I now use an iPhone and an iPad. I'm well aware that I've walked right into a walled garden and to be honest, for mobile devices, I'm very comfortable with that, because I want them to do a few things exactly as advertised. Now as far as actual computing, I am a Windows person for exactly the opposite reason; I am excited that I can do a ton of things, some of which will be Euro Jank and some will be odd little apps that crash every 6th time, but still let the imagination run free.

Would EQ in its original inception have ever passed Apple's standards? Hardly. Was there an insane thirst and market for it anyway? Yep.

[Quinton]

I am trying to imagine where apple would be right now with out the adobe suite of products.

But what has Adobe done for Steve *today*?

[Krakrok]

Flash works on the Wii.

The opportunity to make this image was too good to pass up (regardless of the iPad probably winning).

[Prospero]

Plants vs Zombies is very fun on this thing.

[Quinton]

Cranky Adobe developer: http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888

Quoted in its entirety for posterity (he already edited "What is clear is that Apple has timed this purposely to hurt sales of CS5." to "[Sentence regarding Apple's intentions redacted at request from Adobe]."

[Mrbloodworth]

Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests

[schild]

According to Adobe, hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X, the latter because Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. Adobe goes on to say "The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."

Here's what this all means in layman's terms: Apple isn't allowing Flash to become more efficient on their Mac OS X/Safari platform (or their iPod/iPhone/iPad one, either) by not providing the access to the hardware it needs to reduce its CPU load. Adobe is waiting and watching to see if they do, but, as Ozer says "the ball is in Apple's court."

lol

[Mrbloodworth]

Because I can't tell what the "lol" is for:

In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases.

Link

[Jeff Kelly]

Regarding Java and Java Script:

Action script for all intents and purposes IS java script, Java script has nothing to do with Java at all. Netscape just chose to name the language that way to ride on the coattails of the Java buzz at that time.

Action script and java script share the same roots and even some of the same initial developers.

Hating on Java script is so 1996. Most people who do have never done anything with it in the last ten years. A shitton of really great stuff is done in Java script today. It has any feature you might want today from a sripted language including closures and events and is faster thatn most other interpreted script languages.

The hardware acceleration argument is touted by Adobe time and time again but it's plain wrong. Apple can't expose any hardware acceleration apis because there aren't any. The only Mac chipset that currently supports hardware acceleration for video is the 9400M. Every other Apple hardware decodes video without hardware acceleration. (Core Animation and Core Video don't use hardware acceleration on most macs either)

Every Mac I own manages to play HD content just fine regardless, only flash based content hogs my CPUs so bad that a dual core has both CPUs sitting at 100% just to play a youtube video.

Even if there was an API Adobe could still not use it because most of their Mac stuff is still Carbon based including everything until CS4 and including flash as far as I know.

Java script interpreters have increased speed of interpretation a hundredfold in the last years. Flash has stagnated. A lot of current embedded platforms are perfectly capable of playing SD and HD content software decoded or with minimal hardware acceleration yet flash isn't even efficient on desktop platforms let alone embedded platforms.

The Chrome, Webkit and Firefox Java Script engines are available for any CPU architecture under the sun (or if not are easily ported due to them being open source) yet Flash runs only on Desktop windows or Mac OS X (and there it runs very badly)

Lastly: nobody cares whose fault it is. All people notice is that they can't use flash on their phones. The only party that could change that is Adobe because they are the only ones with access to the source code.

Even if the ball was in Apple's court, each day that Adobe doesn't spend porting flash to the most important embedded os's out there is another day that a switch to HTML 5 by major internet players get's more likely.

HTML 5 capable browsers and JS engines are available for nearly every embedded CPU platform out there and they are open source and easily portable to the next up and coming thing. Adobe shouldn't care who's to blame or whose court the ball is in. If they want to stay relevant with flash that is.

Windows 7 phone edition: no flash support planned
iPhone OS: no flash support planned
Symbian OS: no flash support planned
Maemo, Meego, WebOS: no flash support planned
Android: flash support is in the pipeline, release date unspecified.

Each of these platforms is already HTML 5 capable and most devices running those OS's are capable of decoding HD or SD video in software or with dedicated hardware acceleration support accessible by APIs.

Adobe can blame anyone they want, yet still the ball is in their court and they are about to drop it.

[Quinton]

Lastly: nobody cares whose fault it is. All people notice is that they can't use flash on their phones. The only party that could change that is Adobe because they are the only ones with access to the source code.

Total bullshit.

This is like blaming Google for the lack of a native Google Voice client on iPhone -- Apple will not allow it to be published.

It's very clear here that Steve has decided to ban flash.  The SDK license specificly bans any interpretive language (making a third party flash player or browser with flash impossible), and *now* further specifically bans code that has been converted from flash to native.

This doesn't even specifically have to do with video -- video playback is just one feature of flash, and even assuming there were technical reasons on one side or another that h264 in flash couldn't work on ip*d, there's a lot of other stuff that it's used for (games and cell animation in particular) that should work just fine.

Apple is the gatekeeper here and it's quite clear that they're keeping the door barred.

I will now patiently wait for the apologists to explain to me that this is for my own good, that every one of the existing 150000 iphone apps is a work of art and the platform would be forever sullied if even one flash based app or flash-enabled browser snuck through.  Which is, of course, also bullshit.

[Jeff Kelly]

Even if Apple is actually on a crusade to kill flash this would leave 5 other major players out there that also don't offer flash support.

Is Maemo discouraging Adobe from porting flash?
Is Meego discouraging Adobe from porting flash?
Is Microsoft discouraging Adobe from porting flash to Windows Mobile 6.5 or Windows Phone 7?
Is the Symbian foundation discouraging Adobe from porting flash to Symbian OS?
Is Linus Torvalds discouraging Adobe from porting flash to vanilla Linux?

Don't label me as an Apple fanboy because I simply don't care about flash. I own a lot of hardware and have for the last few years that is simply incapable of running flash based content (mostly because Adobe never bothered to port it) and I don't miss it at all. In my day to day usage of computers I seldom encounter content that actually uses flash and even if I do it's never such an important piece of internet content that I regret not having flash support. For all I care flash could be living on for the next decade or cease to exist tomorrow and I'd hardly even notice.

Why? Because most forward thinking internet companies already forgo flash for more portable and more widely supported technologies. 80% of all pandora subscribers use the service from their smart phones for example. This wouldn't have been possible if pandora was flash based.

A few months or years from now many (if not most) people will access the web from a number of different internet capable phones or devices most of them NOT running Windows 7 or capable of displaying flash based content. Countless devices running a number of different operating systems and supported by a dozen different CPU architectures. All of them today being capable of rendering HTML 5, most of them probably never being capable of interpreting flash based content.

Do the math. Most companies do and they realize that they need to drop flash in order to stay relevant in the future. I for once don't really care I can't name a single killer app for flash today and it will get more difficult in the following months regardless of whether you own an iPhone or any other internet capable smart phone.

Flash is going the way of the dodo whether Apple is actually trying to kill it or not doesn't matter. 90% of all smart phones don't display flash content a number that is much more relevant going forward than any Adobe/Apple rivalry ever will be.

[naum]

It's very clear here that Steve has decided to ban flash.  The SDK license specificly bans any interpretive language (making a third party flash player or browser with flash impossible), and *now* further specifically bans code that has been converted from flash to native.

This doesn't even specifically have to do with video -- video playback is just one feature of flash, and even assuming there were technical reasons on one side or another that h264 in flash couldn't work on ip*d, there's a lot of other stuff that it's used for (games and cell animation in particular) that should work just fine.

Yeah, Jobs has a hardon for Adobe something fierce, they pissed in his kale stew or something — and the feud has been brewing even before the alliance forged that produced Quartz display (supposedly, Adobe folks imported for that task had be quarantined in a windowless building…). Then add how Adobe's signature CS suite has not been tailored for OS X experience, despite a large bulk of its users (those creative sorts) preferring Mac platform over Windows.

If browsers and or iPad OS can natively play H.264 why on earth would you require an additional leaky abstraction of a Flash runtime on top? Again, I call bullshit on the system resource access. For $50, Adobe developer could simply purchase a book on OS X internals and code away.

Outside of silly browser games, video playback is the primary use of Flash. And with the vast improvements in JS engines, soon, will make no sense to layer another leaky abstraction on top of the browser.

[schild]

Outside of silly browser games

Sure. I like calling multi-billion dollar industries silly also. While many may switch over to some bizarre HTML5 concoction and odds are most will get converted in some capacity to an APPLE APPROVED LANGUAGE (still funny to me), calling it silly is sort of, you know, pointing at the big pink elephant in the room and saying "HEY, PINK ELEPHANT, WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE" while he shits on you and then proceeds to ignore your silly presence.

[LK]

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/eye-vs-eye/id304569426?mt=8

Saw this game on iPad today. Brilliant game.

[Ingmar]

More color-blind unfriendly game design. 

[Torinak]

In any case, I think today's updated developer policy by Apple which bans *languages* other than C, C++, objC, and javascript from being used in ip*d apps makes it abundantly clear that the anti-flash stance is primarily a business/competitive issue, not a technical one.

Their requirements that you only use public APIs are not unreasonable, but discriminating against native ARM instruction set *binary* apps based on the *source language* they were compiled from is quite absurd.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/apples-iphone-lockdown-apps-must-be-written-in-one-of-three-la/

Doesn't this license change also prevent use of Unity3D for iPhone apps?

[Quinton]

Doesn't this license change also prevent use of Unity3D for iPhone apps?

Applied strictly as written you could see this disallowing lex and yacc too, or anything that generates native, C, C++, or objectiveC code that is not a C, C++,or objectiveC compiler.  If you were to take the "originally written" phrasing to the logical (insane?) extreme, it would ban code that was ported from some other language, even if it were re-written by hand.

Presumably Apple intends to use this as a justification for banning any apps created using any tool they don't like (say Adobe's flash->native code stuff, but that could include Unity3D or other portability environments).  I suspect the intent is a bit broader than just screwing Adobe and is more "we want to prevent people from writing multi-platform apps".

[Prospero]

It also bans Interface Builder. 

[MahrinSkel]

Apple does not want there to be any way to run programs on their hardware without going through their gatekeeper portals.  Full Stop.  Everything else is window dressing and dramabombs, it's not about code, or user experience, it's about Jobs deciding who can sell programs, and how much of the purchase price they get to keep.  They aren't *unique* in that (every console is in teh same kind of walled garden, and Windows Live is trying to create the same dynamic on PC's).  They are just examples of how bad such a hammer-lock on the environment can be when the guy in charge is a [deleted, I might actually want to put out a game on an Apple platform someday] who exists in a reality distortion field so thick that he hasn't had a conversation with anyone that doesn't work for him in *years*.

--Dave

[MrHat]

In brighter news, the iPad has been jailbroken.

[naum]

Windows 95 on an iPad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9NeRQjGwfs&feature=player_embedded

[naum]

Outside of silly browser games

Sure. I like calling multi-billion dollar industries silly also. While many may switch over to some bizarre HTML5 concoction and odds are most will get converted in some capacity to an APPLE APPROVED LANGUAGE (still funny to me), calling it silly is sort of, you know, pointing at the big pink elephant in the room and saying "HEY, PINK ELEPHANT, WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE" while he shits on you and then proceeds to ignore your silly presence.

OK.

"Multi-billion dollar industries"? I concede it's significant.

But how much of that "multi-billion dollar" chunk is due to a megasized delivery platform like Facebook (or $OtherVastlyVisitedInternetLocale)? That in lieu of that, they return to the status of novelties quickly eschewed?

[ahoythematey]

I guess this link goes here, along with all the other beard-fighting.  http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/apple-takes-aim-at-adobe-or-android.ars

[schild]

Outside of silly browser games

Sure. I like calling multi-billion dollar industries silly also. While many may switch over to some bizarre HTML5 concoction and odds are most will get converted in some capacity to an APPLE APPROVED LANGUAGE (still funny to me), calling it silly is sort of, you know, pointing at the big pink elephant in the room and saying "HEY, PINK ELEPHANT, WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE" while he shits on you and then proceeds to ignore your silly presence.

But how much of that "multi-billion dollar" chunk is due to a megasized delivery platform like Facebook?

You mean liek redherring.com amirite?

[Mattemeo]

I so fucking want Adobe to tell Jobs to go fuck himself, right now.

They won't, I know. It would be a serious commercial shot in the foot on their own part to pull out from Mac development, but the man needs to be taught a lesson. Don't fuck around the people that made your platform popular. Without Adobe Suite, Apple would barely be the company in the fiscal position they currently are. They'd be selling iPods, no doubt, but the core demographic of their computers would be non-existant. And yet now Jobs isn't even content with screwing Adobe (his attempts to screw Andrioid/Google are another matter entirely as discussed above), he's also going to dick with the thousands of app designers whose work doesn't conform to his ridiculous, draconian new NDA yet who helped sell units in droves? Does he have water on the brain?

[Samwise]

Bear in mind that most of those developers are the Mac faithful.  They'll convince themselves that any punishment he hands out is for their own good, and it will only make them more loyal.

And, as you say, Adobe isn't about to cut off their nose to spite their face.

[MahrinSkel]

Without the Adobe graphics tools, Apple wouldn't exist except as a shell.  The *only* thing that got them through the anterregnum without Jobs was the loyalty of the Graphics Arts community to the Adobe toolset and that toolset only existing for the Mac.

--Dave