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Adobe Flash evangelist tells Apple to screw itself

by Scott Bicheno on 12 April 2010, 10:41

Tags: Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE)

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Claws out

A clause in the terms and conditions of Apples newly previewed iPhone OS 4 SDK that appears to ban apps written on development platforms other than those approved by Apple has set the developer community alight over the weekend amid claims that it's needlessly restrictive.

Among the more impassioned protesters was Lee Brimelow - platform evangelist at Adobe focusing on the Flash, Flex, and AIR developer communities. He wrote a blog post entitled "Apple Slaps Developers In The Face", in which he accuses Apple of "...wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe."

Brimelow was referring in part to the continued lack of support for Adobe Flash by Apple, but mainly to the fact that this new clause seems to be aimed directly at the Flash to iPhone compiler to be included in Adobe CS5. He went on to rant about the "hostile and despicable move", but the most remarkable comment came at the end of his post in which he said: "Go screw yourself Apple."

There hasn't been a formal Apple response to all this kerfuffle, but developer Greg Slepak got a couple of short email responses from Steve Jobs himself. In the first, Jobs pointed to a blog post by John Gruber as a decent summary of the reasons behind the new clause.

In response to the accusation of limiting creativity with this rule, Jobs said: "We've been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform."

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Obviously Apple can set whichever rules it wants for its OSs and the massive success of its devices and platforms generally ensures developers will put up with them, however onerous. But will Android going from strength to strength and Microsoft, Intel and Nokia getting their act together, there's soon going to be a lot of choice for developers and consumers.

If the top developers start abandoning the iPhone and the best apps are then available elsewhere, it could have a profound effect on sales of future iPhones, no matter how shiny they are.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 9 Comments

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Well you could argue the merits of your platform, or you could just …….

It is interesting because Adobe have returned to profitability by focusing on the windows market, anyone except a rabid fanboy will tell you that £1,200 easily goes further on Microsoft for making a higher performance PC or laptop for photoshopping.

As such who would they really hurt by starting to delay the release of photoshop on the mac? That would be my tactic to remind them who their friends are.

Apple clearly don't give a damn about the issue of performance or code security of flash, its all about their sales channel been the one and only for all content end to end. Their dev tools are rather crap, objective C is a very outdated small talk clone after all, they do kind of need adobe in the middle.
TheAnimus
Apple clearly don't give a damn about the issue of performance or code security of flash, its all about their sales channel been the one and only for all content end to end. Their dev tools are rather crap, objective C is a very outdated small talk clone after all, they do kind of need adobe in the middle.

+ not caring about developers or encouraging education systems to adopt it as a teaching medium (MS provide free licences to the marketplace for students via dreamspark and as with android dev toolss/sdk is free to access)

I think you can use C++ now for it, however even so the T+C's on the SDK are quite restrictive

Reminds me of the micky take “great sites to look at on the ipad” with all the sites that used flash. IIRC it's partly why Youtube changed.
Other companies get fined millions of pounds for lesser restrictions…
I'm sorry to say Apple have a history of this type of tactic - restricting access, becuase they have the “better” platform, and want to 'preserve it's integrity' (my phrase, to describe how I see their attitude).

And after all, it worked so well in the battle between the Mac and the PC standard. :rolleyes:

If Apple hadn't had their heads firmly stuck in …. erm …. the sand, the balance between PC and Apple platforms might not be so dominated by PC.

It seems old dogs aren't the only things incapable of learning new tricks. Sad, in my view, but not exactly a shock.
well why dont adobe pull all of their software for mac or just release no further updates for things like photoshop and flash?