1. Steve Jobs' arguments about why they don't support Flash on iPhone and iPad: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
2. Adobe's passive-agressive response: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/files/AdobeAppleAd.pdf
3. Adobe's CEO answering on the topic: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/tab/liveblog/
I agree with the CEO guy on that the technological issues are not enough of an issue to ban flash development for iPhone. As far as I know, iPhone doesn't support Java neither:
Jobs: "Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain." (source)
It doesn't take a Java fan to say it is very unfair to Java. Java's still serving us very well in many levels. (Altough Java programmers getting paid more IS a sign that it is dieing, Java is not only a programming language (*).)
Apple does have the tendancy to provoke a closed community with a sense of eliteness, and it has so far worked good for them. If they (and with 'they', I mean both customers and producers of iPad and iPhone) are fine with less applications then there is not much to say. Indeed, Jobs' manifest may be targeting only the Apple customers who demand Flash, telling them not having Flash is just another way to separate them from the crowd.
They must be making huge moneys from the app store, and freely available flash applications on the web would not help much. I wonder how many of those applications on the store would be obsolete if only iPhone supported flash?
I also am long disturbed with the Flash monopoly on rich internet applications and hoping to see what people will do with HTML5. But that's another topic.
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Thinking Adobe had bought Macromedia only a few years ago, and Macromedia's Flash is now Adobe's most discussed product, It surely was a good buy.
3 comments:
I see your point about Apple being evil. Microsoft tries to lock people in using their crappy OS, and of course being a good hardware manufacturer Apple tries to lock people in using their devices (and OSs on them). This is the capitalist world, get used to it.
Screw AppStore. The soul of native applications is sold. Let's -at least- save the web.
Contrary to what usually happens, xHTML+Javascript+CSS brothers are strong standards. These big companies don't like standards because it stops them from locking people in. But for practical reasons, they have to settle for a common ground and it turns out to be open web technologies.
From now on, with all my power(!), I declare every application to be implemented using the server side technology of your taste combined with open web standards. Stop implementing client applications. Use the browser!
On the client side, you can do *almost* everything using xHTML+JS+CSS. For the rest, hang on, good technologies are being ported to browsers. I anticipate in the near future that every browser will have a very fast javasript implemetation, and an even-faster-if-you-need alternative, like LLVM.
Here comes the initial attempts: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/05/google-native-client.php
I did not at all make a point about apple being evil. I'm just saying it's normal and understandable. Just like you put it right: "this is the capitalist world, get used to it.". I'm not even blaming them for behaving capitalist. What they're doing is valid in its own integrity.
About the web; yes, the web tech now is capable of doing almost everything that desktop applications can do. But for some apps, the web development is just tiresome and expensive. The client-server thing, added with people's current habits with the web making it very slow to change, will be a overhead for web for long time.
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