The backlash is starting to show. The most recent change in Apple’s iPhone developer agreement isn’t going down well. The change is clearly aimed at increasing lock-in, and seems to have little to nothing to do with anything else. While individual developers are hit hard, Adobe as a whole has been hit pretty hard too, giving rise to sentiments on the web that Adobe should abandon Mac development. I have the sneaking suspicion this is exactly what Apple is aiming for.
Why?
There’s a lot of discussion going on about the recent change in the iPhone developer agreement. Apple specifically prohibits the use of any non-Apple approved programming language; if you want your application in the App Store, your application must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript. This means that tools like MonoTouch, Unity3D, or Ansca’s Corona can no longer be used for iPhone development, and several other tools are problematic as well.
Unity3D hurts specifically since I believe Colorbind is one of the best iPhone games ever made (and yes, I’ve finished all levels, without looking up solutions on the internet).
While that in and of itself is bad enough, Apple’s move seems almost specifically designed to rain on Adobe’s parade, who is about to release CS5, which has as one of its main features the ability to produce iPhone applications similar to how some of those other tools work. Since Apple (or Jobs?) dislikes Adobe, they had to do something to prevent CS5 from having this functionality.
While Apple’s dislike for Adobe is one reason, another is of course that of platform lock-in. Apple does not want you to develop for the iPhone – they want you to develop for the iPhone and nothing else. Apple does not want cross-platform development where developers can easily target Android, the iPhone OS, webOS, and others, all at the same time.
Android’s growth is exponential. We already saw that in the US, Android has almost overtaken the iPhone OS in mobile browsing share, and a few days ago the news hit that Android’s Market Place is seeing enormous growth as well; last month, over 9000 new applications were added, and this number is growing rapidly every month. Android is clearly a threat to the iPhone, and Apple acts accordingly – which includes suing HTC.
Adobe’s response
In the meantime, Adobe isn’t particularly happy about this situation. Even though Lee Brimelow, Platform Evangelist at Adobe, spoke on his own accord, it would be understandable if his sentiments are prevalent throughout the company. “What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them,” Brimelow writes, “This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe.”
“I am positive that there are a large number of Apple employees that strongly disagree with this latest move,” he adds, “Any real developer would not in good conscience be able to support this. The trouble is that we will never hear their discontent because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted.”
“Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment,” he says, “Go screw yourself Apple.”
At this point, Adobe plans to ship CS5 with the iPhone cross-compiler built-in anyway. “We are aware of Apple’s new SDK language and are looking into it,” Adobe told The New York Times, “We continue to develop our Packager for iPhone OS technology, which we plan to debut in Flash CS5.” Since CS5’s release is planned for next week, this only makes sense.
Adobe should cease Mac development
This is a sentiment that is starting to rise from the fallout. If Apple time and time again purposefully screws over Adobe, maybe Adobe should bite back and pull the rug from underneath Apple? The Mac only has a 5% world wide market share, so you can’t say with a straight face that Adobe makes most of its money through Mac users. There’s no inherent reason why you should run Photoshop & Co. on a Mac, other than it has always been that way.
Brimelow has already stated this is not a very likely course of action. “Many of Adobe’s supporters have mentioned that we should discontinue the Creative Suite products on OS X as a form of retaliation,” he states, “Again, this is something that Adobe would never consider in a million years. We are not looking to abuse our loyal users and make them pawns for the sake of trying to hurt another company. What is clear is that Apple most definitely would do that sort of thing as is evidenced by their recent behavior.”
Despite Adobe’s understandable reluctance, after discussing this issue with Eugenia, I have been convinced this is exactly what Apple is aiming for: Apple wants Adobe to ditch its Mac products. The reason? Apple is working on a Photoshop competitor. If that’s the case (we’re just speculating, after all), it would benefit Apple greatly if Adobe ditch the Mac.
“In fact, I would not be surprised at all if Apple is working on a Photoshop replacement already for years now, in secret,” Eugenia speculates, “If that’s true, the clever thing for Adobe would be to not abandon the Mac platform.” Again, let me reiterate we’re just speculating.
“Although the Final Cut Studio (FCS fills up the functionality of Premiere and After Effects) and Aperture competition thing is not speculation, it’s fact,” Eugenia adds, “The only other interesting apps in the CS4 suite are Photoshop and Illustrator. It’s possible that Apple might see the loss of Illustrator as an acceptable casualty for their platform (for now), but for the Photoshop thing, I think they might already be working on a replacement app. The rest of the CS4 apps don’t really matter.”
This is an interesting theory, but of course, there’s no way to test its validity other than to just wait and see. It does sound plausible, and fits in perfectly with Jobs’ mindset.
1.) If it’s true that Apple has a Photoshop competitor that’s really just as good (or better), they would still lose not only Illustrator, but also InDesign. The Macintosh would no longer be the preferred DTP system. No sane publishing house would switch from Photoshop to Apple whatever, back from InDesign to Quark XPress (on the Mac) and from Illustrator to Illustrator for Windows. Ridiculous.
2.) If Adobe kills Photoshop for Mac and Apple would then announce their “Photoshop killer”, everyone would see this as an act of desperation: “Oh no, Adobe killed Photoshop for Mac, we must offer an alternative as quickly as possible, even if it’s not nearly as good.”
So Apple should definitely announce their application while Photoshop is still available and it would not make sense to force Adobe to leave the Mac market before.
Flash is a platform that allows third party apps to run in it’s environment.
Apple wants to control what applications are allowed to run on it’s mobile devices.
Period.
That’s not the only reason. The propensity for some flash Apps to go into “allyourCPUbelongstous mode” and burn significant battery life is another. How many times have you realized a flash app is eating up CPU because your laptop got hotter than normal, or your fans turned on when you weren’t doing anything processor intensive?
The whole reason? Likely not, but it’s a legitimate concern and problem with Flash on battery-powered devices.
It’s the Flash VM that is s**t poor, their Flash to iPhone compiler may be quite good. But on the other hand, you can burn the battery with C/C++/ObjC just as easily.
Jobs said it loud and clear why he does not want Flash to iPhone. It’s all about control.
Adobe will most likely release one or two “photoshop killers” them selves over the next few years as well. It will most likely be replaced by more specialized applications like Lightroom.
It’s hard to see a future for Photoshop. It an app that tries to cover each and every segment, and it doesn’t do it all that well.
I spoke to a couple of Adobe employees about it and they seemed to agree with me, and they confirmed that it’s most likely they direction that they will be moving in.
> The only other interesting apps in the CS4 suite
> are Photoshop and Illustrator […]
So InDesign and Acrobat don’t count for anything? Oh, there’s Pages and the built-in PDF support, should be enough for everyone, right?
Mac is not 5% of Photoshop users! It’s probably considerably more; in times past it would have been even more than Windows users.
No, Adobe wouldn’t outright drop CS (because remember, dropping Photoshop is useless unless you drop the whole suite of applications). Adobe has too much invested, and is making too much money out of it (<sarcasm>Mac Photoshop users just love paying to upgrade this crap every year</sarcasm>).
Apple do want to rile Adobe though. They have been producing awful un-mac like software that’s slow, bloated, crashy and a danger to little kittens. It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple have been cooking up a Photoshop competitor themselves, but they know they will have an incredibly hard sell given how iron-like Photoshop’s grip is on the market. Why else would they test the waters with Aperture? A niche product safely filling an area of photography that wasn’t then being served by Adobe.
Adobe have said that they will still ship CS5—with the iPhone app compiler too.
Apple want Adobe to stop producing half-arsed software and they are going to put the squeeze on ever tighter until Adobe caves. Expect a lawsuit within the year.
I never said so. All I’m saying is that evne if every Mac user paid for Photoshop, it probably still wouldn’t beat the amount of licenses sold to Windows users.
Not every Windows user is going to buy a Photoshop licence. Adobe’s market is the creative industry (art | media | design | dtp | web-development), which primarily uses Mac (that may well change of course). Of Adobe’s maximum potential sale pool, Macs make up an inescapably profitable proportion.
It would be suicide for Adobe to _drop_ Mac support; but they could cripple it, and piss off users enough for them to switch to Windows over time. I suspect that’s been their bread and butter for a long time anyway given how far downhill the Mac port has gone.
You refer to Mac Photoshop as a “Mac port” (that’s “gone downhill”). Is it the case that Adobe targets Windows then ports to Mac? I had heard that the reverse was true.
Adobe targets windows, thats been true for at least a decade now.
Whenever someone is quoted as ‘All I’m saying is…’ they are usually saying nothing at all.
Your talking about hundreds of millions of dollars here that Adobe would have to forego to make a point about why we need Flash on the iPhone/iPod. You want Flash? Good bye to your battery on your iphone or ipad or whatever.
Also who are you kidding about wanting lock-in? If you want lock in you cant find it more than with Unity3D, and Flash! They pick the platforms and you run on in it. You think C/C++ and OpenGL means lock in? Give me a break.
Apple wants tight control of their platform. if you want to develop for the iphone, gotta play by steve jobs’ rules. not that there is anything wrong with it. I just believe developers and users would be better off if developers can CHOOSE what tools they use to write the programs. No one except apple fanboys can possibly applaud this developer agreement change.
Edited 2010-04-10 21:01 UTC
But… But… The children…
You dont have a clue how much money Mac’s Adobe CS generate for Adobe. If Adobe’s management are stupid enough to drop Mac Sales, then any investor should immediately sell their stocks.
I sincerely wish Microsoft would also pressure Apple to finally produce decent Windows software. Apple fanatics [not referring to you] seem to find it a-okay for Apple to bully Adobe, so let’s just imagine what the backlash would be like if Microsoft started pressuing Apple in similar ways to finally produce a version of iTunes:Win that isn’t t total piece of shit.
Apple = Adobe of the Windows world.
Edited 2010-04-10 11:37 UTC
Yep, you probably would call me a Windows basher if you talked to me for more than ten minutes about computers.
But ITunes for Windows has to be one of the worse programs I have ever seen. Even the things I don’t like about Windows and normally blame Microsoft’s design teams for (ie dialog boxes, file requesters), somehow Apple figured out how to make far worse.
I find the 9.x series to be much improved. Maybe its just personal preference.
Does anyone else think that Apple is being cheeky about the whole thing? Maybe they are trying to show how bad things can really get on a windows when developers have no guidelines or standards to follow, because at this point the software is just to ridiculous to be anything other than Apple having a good belly laugh at windows users expense. Maybe its too prove a point about how bad Office for Mac has been (specifically Entourage), or past atrocities like IE for Mac, Media Player for Mac. This is all just speculation of course.
I really doubt Apple is trying to make bad software for Windows. They’re just not trying very hard to make good software for Windows, and also trying their best to reuse their Mac codebase. I’ve gotta believe that there’s some sort of quasi-compatibility layer for the GUI that they’re using to port over from the Mac, and we all know how great software written to a compatibility layer is. Couple that with the fact that being a Windows developer at Apple probably isn’t the greatest job in the world (and also probably not where they’re paying top dollar), and the result is….well, what you see.
I’ve been perplexed about iTunes for Windows. Because the iPod and then iPhone have been so tied to iTunes, one would think Apple would make an excellent version of iTunes for Windows. But, it is has been total crap.
iTunes is easily the worst program that I use. It takes longer to load than Visual Studio which says enough.
I’m all for code recycling but iTunes is a case of Apple laziness and apathy. The least they could do is reskin it so it at least looks like a Windows program. Would it kill them to use Windows media style buttons?
I also love the predominant Apple logo at the top of the program. As if anyone needs to be reminded that they are using an Apple product.
I think that they are just enabling the Windows users to take a glance at the “apple heaven”. It’s a sort of advertisement: “This is how your computing experience will be like if you hurry up and switch for the mac.”
Edited 2010-04-11 16:14 UTC
But they could do something small, like removing Flash player and other free stuff from OSX. That would save some money and put pressure on Apple hihi.
Adobe’s sales pitch is write once, run anywhere. Dropping Flash on OS X would really restrict the validity of that. Apple’s got Adobe over a barrel, and Adobe really don’t have any moves left.
As much as I dislike Adobe, should Apple have this control over companies that provide for their platform?
Hell no.
In case you didn’t know, Adobe CS also includes non-standard UI, bugs, and bloat on Windows. For the UI, I think it’s for the sake of cross-platform consistency (“photoshop on windows is the same as photoshop on Mac OS”), but for the rest… Well… To me, Apple users don’t look specially screwed up by Adobe*, especially considering that it’s one of the sole companies who dares to make Mac-compatible software… Sure, they’re not top priority, but they’re not top market share in the computer market either.
Have a look at the horrible Mac versions of common freeware like GIMP or VLC if you think porting software to Mac OS is easy.**
* This does not mean that I think Adobe software is good software by any mean, just that I think it’s about the same experience on the Mac and on Windows. Except for flash, which is knowingly crap on non-windows platforms.
** Please note that this could be caused by Apple introducing some UNIX+X11 compatibility without finishing the job, which makes Linux devs happily think they can just copy-paste their code and understand their mistake too late.
Edited 2010-04-12 20:14 UTC
You are wrong in one thing, placement of Mac and Photoshop. Photoshop has definitely more than 5% of Mac users. But it’s Photoshop that has users, Mac is a casualty there. It’s like games and Windows.
Abound in relation to this whole thing. Oh, btw Thom, this post was clearly typed up without editorial review, based on the language/grammar used, but I’ll let others point that out
One theory I’ve read is that Apple is doing this so that applications will behave in a consistent manner, not just on the GUI level, but also in taking advantage of the special features of the system that allow apps to run more efficiently in the OS, including power usage minimization, and for iPhoneOS 4.0, multitasking. This theory I’ve read also states that an insider that’s the source says that the system detects how an application is used to make these determinations, and that using a non-standard language that’s been translated to somehow make the calls or that doesn’t use the libraries disrupts that: unless a compatibility layer deliberately is designed for easy porting where it always does something inefficient like do all computations for graphics in software instead of offloading to the display hardware which is optimized for it, I personally can’t see that logic making sense, as a developer: code is code! Apple already filters out applications if they violate the Apple GUI guidelines, which is more easily understood and relatively reasonable: though, if you ask me, while standardization of user interface is a good thing, being too standardized and requiring everyone to do so is stifling to progress.
Now, for perhaps an even wilder speculation than the one you’ve suggested: what if Apple has no in-house project going on that may replace Adobe’s software, and is instead, trying to twist things such that Adobe falls in market value and profits far enough to make it easier for Apple to buy them out and add them to their stable of assets and products? After all, they have a huge cash stack, and need to use it somehow, but who wants to pay full price when you can get a discount? I’ll leave things there: I’d be surprised if that’s the plan, but I thought it’d be fun for discussion to throw it out there
You are saying that Apple hurts itself so much, only to compete photoshop? And with a not-yet-released alternative?
I dont think so. I dont know why Apple fights Adobe so hard, but i dont think its only because of their photoshop alternative.
How is the Creative Suite involved in this at all?
Perhaps I could understand people urging Adobe to discontinue Flash development for Mac (or iPhone, if there is any), as by the developer agreement, you’re not allowed to write iPhone apps with it anyway. On the other hand, there are Apple’s desktop and laptop computers, so there is a reason to keep Flash.
At best, I could understand if they would ask Adobe to kill their cross-compiler. Then again, the agreement might change after some time and enough pressure. (Someone at Apple needs a good wake-up slapping these days, it seems?)
But how does all this concern the CS? I don’t see a reason besides primitive revenge. And Adobe can only win by not doing so. Especially in respect to their reputation, but it would also make no sense at all to quit that market. If the Apple fans can be trusted in saying “most artists use Macs” even more so.
Maybe Apple is using it’s market position to get a bit back at Adobe screwing over Apple for years? Hideously bad Flash performance, tardy and constantly buggy releases and updates to key apps – and remind me how long did it take them to release a native Intel version of CS? Or is it OK for Adobe to do that but Apple should be more mature and adult about it?
Personally I don’t think it has anything to do with that though, or with Android for that matter. It is again nothing more than a corporation who’s primary goal is returns to their investors making what they believe to be the best business move to protect their platform. Nothing more, nothing less. Whether it is the right move remains to be seen, but they wouldn’t have done it without a risk analysis.
It’s also amazing that the same people who have screamed about the plethora of crapware in the App Store are now on Apple’s case about a restriction that should go some way to curtailing it.
Methinks thou dost protest too much…
That’s a nonsense argument. 95% of the App Store is crap – you can’t tell me all those were developed with competing tools.
Can you tell us they weren’t?
95% is crap? <sarcasm> Oh yeah, thats some well researched Science! </sarcasm>
For me personally 99.75% is crap, for most people probably close to 90%. Based on approx numbers. I leave it to you to figure out how many apps in the AppStore I found worth while.
Just out of curiosity, what percentage of desktop apps would you say are crap? I find the appstore has a significantly higher awesome to crap ratio then I am used to.
I never said such a thing. We’re looking at Apple’s agreement change here, not Adobe’s past performance. I think I have made myself very clear over the years that I’m not a fan of Adobe products.
And as I went on to say I don’t believe it actually has anything whatsoever to do with that anyway…
Are you serious?
It is again nothing more than a corporation who’s primary goal is returns to their investors making what they believe to be the best business move to protect their platform. Nothing more, nothing less.
Through locking developers into Apple’s own weird development model so that their apps can’t be cross platform, thereby locking users to their platform. Oh, that’s just business.
It’s also amazing that the same people who have screamed about the plethora of crapware in the App Store are now on Apple’s case about a restriction that should go some way to curtailing it.
Ah, the old “what’s bad for you is good for you” delusional Apple fanboi argument.
(edited for html reasons)
Edited 2010-04-10 12:04 UTC
Yeah, that MVC development model that they championed after Smalltalk started it is so weird. So weird in fact that everyone is using either MVC or a variant of it.
Um, he’s not referring to MVC. Though it does suck that Apple’s tools practically force you to use MVC, and you have to fight againt the tools in order to use a more appropriate model for the app in question.
He’s referring to Obj-C, Cocoa, XCode, Interface Builder, and the rest of that severely over-engineered garbage.
Edited 2010-04-11 07:49 UTC
Remember when they were almost gone and Gates single handedly saved them? I wish he didn’t.
Despite all of its great products over time, the company does not deserve to exist. Their employees are not allowed to blog? Come on! I wish they get stepped on like a bug by Google or anyone else for that matter.
Yeah, I know… I’m talking gibberish, but I’m really pissed off…
You have an interesting perspective on history if you actually believe that. Go do some research on that topic and you’ll find there was nothing noble about Gate’s actions at the time, and in no way did he single handedly do anything let alone save Apple…
OK. Don’t get so jumpy about it. Of course, Microsoft had its own agenda with the anti-trust suit and all, but that was not my point.
I was only going for the dramatic effect there.
Edited 2010-04-10 12:44 UTC
I really wish 99% of humanity would realize these corporations are outmoded and counterproductive and just switch to FOSS. Apple is evil, Adobe is crap, and Windows is somewhere in between. Evil AND crap.
Going for complete standards compliance, and open standards would go a long way to liberating the populace in the digital age. Google backing Theora may be one of the last relevant things any of these mega-corps do before they are replaced by FOSS.
You’re such a realist. I like that.
Now, let us all get in our VW Kombi, go some place nice, take some acid to expand our consciousness, and spread some peace and love while having a really groove time. Oh, and I call shotgun!
That really did make me laugh – and all along I had been thinking it was Steve Jobs who saved Apple
Bill invested $150 million and a commitment on Office for 5 years. A handy confidence booster but Apple had a lot more than that in its cash reserves. In return Gate’s got a lot of patent agreements sorted with Apple and IE as the default browser at the hight of his exposure to a monopolist accusation. It was a pragmatic deal between two businessmen.
I am sure Apple’s renaissance that followed came as a complete shock to Bill. Cringley’s blog has an article about a taped interview he did with Bill Gates in 1998.
http://www.cringely.com/2010/04/masters-tournament/
It has this delicious quote from Gates:
“What I can’t figure out is why he (Steve Jobs) is even trying (to be the CEO of Apple)? †wondered Bill. “He knows he can’t win.â€
That’s just it Bill – Steve always thought he could win – but it meant playing a different game. And the game continues.
It was Steve Jobs that was ruining Apple.
The reason he was sacked from his own company was because he was leading it into bankruptcy.
His greatest asset is also his greatest weakness. Being single-minded only works if the rest of the world agree. Sadly the rest of the world didn’t and thus he had to go.
When Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, Apple wasn’t being driven into bankruptcy: it was an altogether different leader that drove Apple to the brink. During 1985, there was an industry-wide sales slump, and sure, Apple had a lot of layoffs then. But, Steve Jobs was not driving Apple into the ground, and sure, Steve Jobs clearly made some mistakes up to that point.
Steve Jobs returned precisely because Apple for many years rested on their laurels, and had a succession of failures at coming up with the next Mac OS, and eventually, Steve Jobs sold the IP of NeXT to Apple to base the next Mac OS on. Sure, it took a few years to whip it into a Mac-like OS for quite a few things, and it was slow at the start, but it was a much better OS for stability and had memory protection. During the time Steve Jobs was gone, Apple diversified their product line to an extreme, AND tried the hardware clone licensing bit, and found that wasn’t making them money: when Steve Jobs returned, he mercilessly cut out projects and products that didn’t hold enough commercial promise, stopped the licensing of Mac OS to clone makers altogether, and greatly streamlined the product lines, and then created The Next Big Thing for Apple, the iPod.
I think, for the most part, Steve Jobs has learned to reign in his desire for utmost artistic impression on products that renders them insane from an engineering standpoint (the Apple 3 was a major failure as a result of not wanting the aesthetics as a result of using a noisy fan) though there are clearly things that still leave me scratching my head. But, for the most part: he has a rather decent record for successfully identifying things people will buy, even if they didn’t know such a thing could be done, and never knew they wanted something like that befor that point. If you look at the financial records since he came back to Apple, and argue against his results, that seems like insanity. Nice guy or not, he’s managed to get Apple into a very successful position, because of his focus, and insistence that Apple also maintain a similar focus.
Now, it’s things like this SDK agreement change that leaves you wondering: why is he really doing that? Is it to try to enforce a vision of the user experience by tools used, or is it more ideological, why? Time to get out the popcorn!
I just speculating, but maybe somehow Microsoft needs crApple. Otherwise, being in Gates’s shoes, I would have pulled the plug from crApple long ago.
Maybe Microsoft needs crApple and it’s 5% marketshare. That way, people not contended with Windows just go to the shop, buy a Mac and use Os X. 5% market share is somewhat controllable and predictable.
If it were no crApple, no Os X, maybe people not contended with Windows would have used a more open platform like Linux, therefore pushing to make that platform see more improvements and making some big commercial developers to release their software for it.
Wordplay like crApple, Microsoft and Windblows never ceases to cause a rumble of laughter from welling up deep within me, only to spill out into LOLs and ROTFLOLs.
I agree with the article in the sense that it does seem like Apple is trying to get Adobe to leave them altogether. Why? That I cannot say, but I doubt Apple would be able to release anything as good as Adobe CS5.
If Apple managed to drag Adobe out of their market altogether I actually believe Apple would lose helluva lot of people, especially creative designers. And that’d HURT: those people often buy high-end hardware, expensive screens and whatnot. And f.ex. Photoshop CS5 includes the new automatic tool for removing parts of the picture and the tool has literally gotten hundreds of enthusiasts moisting their underwear in a way that even if Adobe screwed everyone over and went Windows-only they’d STILL keep their customers.
Apple’s/Jobs’s obsession with control will bite them back sooner or later, and it’ll hurt.
Well put it this way. There is lots of Linux users out there that would quiet easily replace OS X users using Photoshop(I would for starters).
If this is what Apple is trying to do, then Adobe should shift development to Linux and Windows only then.
I find it hard to believe it will happen, unless Apple really do have a Photoshop killer coming but from what I see, Aperture is not really a LightRoom killer.
Agreed on all accounts but wanted to point out that GIMP has had that ability since forever with its Resynthesizer plug-in – http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer
One blogger recently went as far as using the SAME pictures that Adobe used for its presentation on Youtube and got the same results as the ones demonstrated in the video.
I had to try it myself of course with some family pictures and I can attest that its output matches what Adobe claims: I was able to seamlessly remove people from pictures with awesome results!
Edited 2010-04-10 17:11 UTC
Maybe Apple has been secretly working on a native port of GIMP… all simplified and cleaned up, easier to use…
It is not just the CS suite. There is an ecosystem of tools around it that is inreplacable.
If Apple is really pushing to chuck Adobe by the wayside, it’s going to have to create some alternative for developers and designers.
Maybe somewhere in Cupertino there is an iFlash being developed?
Maybe Gnash is about to receive a huge code dump…?
</rampant half-serious speculation>
In all seriousness, why would Apple advocate HTML 5 as a replacement for Flash when HTML 5 is an open standard? Where’s the lock in there? I agree with you, Thom, that Apple’s other moves are pro-lock in, so why are they taking this one step back? (Or one step forward, as it were.)
Does Silverlight have a Mac version, I wonder?
Apple only advocate HTML5 in conjunction with the h.264 codec.
There is the lock-in right there.
Fortunately, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and IE (via the Google Chrome Frame plugin) all support HTML5/Theora, but Firefox and Opera do not support HTML5/h264 (Safari supports ONLY HTML5/h264).
There is an Opera Mini app submitted to the iPhone App Store
http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2010/03/23_3/
If Apple allow that, the iPhone/iPad would also support HTML5/Theora.
That would break Apple’s attempt at lock-in.
video tag is only a very small piece of HTML5, and the video format isn’t even part of the spec anymore. That may be all the blogosphere cares about at the moment, but webkit is currently the best platform for the web.
Yes, there’s a Mac version. But not an iPhone OS version (Jobs wouldn’t allow that, for the same reasons that as he doesn’t allow Flash to exist on iPhone OS).
If Adobe had any balls, it would declare Linux one of its premier platfoms and would make sure that all of its products run perfectly on Linux.
If Microsoft or Apple ever pull a fast one on you, you have a whole platform that you can customize for no money down.
Proprietary software houses should begin to see the light. The fact that the OS is not run or owned by any single company is a huge advantage. The only thing they have to do is make sure that their apps keep up with the improvements made in the base system, but that is a reasonable thing to do, particularly because Adobe would be targetting LTS releases from Ubuntu, Redhat or Opensuse as their primary targets.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.342.9 Safari/533.2
I would welcome such a move as it would fill several holes. I would love After Effects on Linux. However, the Linux market is very small I don’t think enough users would be willing to spend that kind of money for Adobe’s software. GIMP may not be as good as Photoshop, but is the difference worth $700?
The people that need to see the light are those like you that have no idea as to what a PITA it is to deploy and support proprietary software in Linux compared to Windows or OS X.
Either Thom has very bad memory, lies on purpose to increase advertising traffic, or simply has no clue.
“Apple time and time again purposefully screws over Adobe”? WTF?
OK, here’s a history lesson:
– Adobe cancels FrameMaker for Mac after v7.0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker#Versions
– Adobe cancels Premiere for Mac after v6.5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Premiere#Release_history
– Adobe did not release Photoshop Elements v5 and v7 for Mac. v4 and v6 were released 1 year after their Windows counterparts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop_Elements#Mac_version_r…
– Adobe Audition and Premiere Elements are both only available for Windows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Audition / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Premiere_Elements
– Adobe Photoshop CS4 only for Windows in 64 bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop#CS4
– Adobe Flash performance is horrible on Mac compared to Windows:
# GUIMark
Windows: 46 FPS, 54 CPU
Mac Pro: 28 FPS, 140 percent CPU
# Hulu
Windows: 7 percent CPU
Mac Pro: 56 percent CPU
# YouTube
Windows: 6 percent CPU
Mac Pro: 56 percent CPU
# 2advanced
Windows: 2 percent CPU, peaking at 31
Mac Pro: 28 percent CPU, peaked at 66
# Winterbells
Windows: 9 percent CPU, peaking at 14
Mac Pro: 60 percent CPU
(Benchmark results by ArsTechnica: http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/10/benchmarking-flash-pla… )
It’s Adobe who screws over Apple over and over again, not the other way around.
Adobe is clearly unwilling to release a well performing Flash version for Cocoa-based systems, with the most extreme case in the benchmark being that the Mac version requires 14x as much CPU as the Windows version (2% CPU vs. 28% CPU in 2advanced) and has dropped development of Mac apps over and over again. Now Adobe is getting the bill for doing so.
Not that I’m in the mood to defend either company, but Apple doesn’t help the situation by hiding APIs that Adobe could use to improve performance (ie. hardware acceleration), which of course Apple’s own Safari can utilize for HTML 5 performance. I’ve also seen people point to the NSPlugin API on OSX as being flaky, as evidenced by the fact that the standalone flashplayer performs notably better than the browser plugin (though still not at Windows levels), where they should be relatively equal.
For that reason alone, Flash will always perform much more efficiently on Windows than on OSX.
Those are lies told by Adobe to hide the fact that Adobe could’ve used OpenGL for accelerated Flash rendering since the 1990s.
Edited 2010-04-11 00:33 UTC
Those kind of statements are made by crApple fanatics who don’t know what OpenGL is, have no clue about Flash and video playing, but want to defend their adored company. They just think that OpenGL is “something that accelerates things up”.
I’m not an Apple user.
It’s amusing to see how retards like you jump to conclusions.
That’s not true. I have to repeat what I said on Osnews earlier: Adobe is releasing version 10.1 which has huge performance improvements, uses almost no CPU (I’m using in right now) due to the fact that is harwdare accelerated. But Adobe can’t do the same for Os X due to the fact that crApple unreasonably refuses to expose the hooks to do so.
And this took Adobe how many years?
Strange… many every other Mac developers have figured out how to use that “unexposed” API called OpenGL.
Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash and maybe you will understand what is OpenGL and Flash.
“OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics.”
“Flash can manipulate vector and raster graphics”
Poor guy. Are youtube videos “computer graphics”? Flash has performance issues when it comes to movies. Especially HD movies. You don’t accelerate movies using OpenGL which is an graphics API. You use something like DXVA or VDPAU.
First and foremost: This article is about not allowing Flash-based applications (like games) and not web video streaming.
But to give you some clue, I explain it to you:
There are (simplified explanation) two aspects of video playback: Decoding the stream and displaying it. What else would displaying a video be if not computer graphics?
Displaying videos is, of course, an operation that can be accelerated via OpenGL. Smoothly scaling videos to full screen can be accelerated by OpenGL for example.
And videos are not the only capability for Flash. In case of Flash apps/games videos are actually only a very minor part.
Holly crap! This must be the most clueless comment I have seen on OSnews for some time!!!
You need to understand the difference between OpenGL bit-blitting functions (which by the way are _not_ GPU accelerated in newer graphic cards) and GPU acceleration.
PS. great article Thom, even though I am not so sure you are correct this time.
Edited 2010-04-11 12:11 UTC
Dear OpenGL genius.
Stretching a video to fill the screen can be smoothed via bilinear or trilinear filtering. This is GPU-accelerated.
Thanks for your time.
Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash and maybe you will understand what is OpenGL and Flash.
Just to pop in: I don’t understand your point. Flash can be Flash and yet still draw its elements using OpenGL. Even video playback can be accelerated by shader programs and then rendered to textures and swapped to screen, and that’s a whole lot faster than doing it all in software.
Go and accelerate video playing using OpenGL. Good luck with that and come back after you did it.
You’ve obviously never heard of shader programs, huh? GLSL, ie. shader programs, ARE actually part of OpenGL specs and can be used for almost anything, including video acceleration.
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Hardware_Accelerated_Video_Dec…
Programming shaders (Pixel Shader or Vertex Shader), with one shader for each video decoding process that one would wish to accelerate is one such method. GPGPU (General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units) is another possible method.
Oh, and f.ex. MPlayer does support OpenGL video playback, so does GStreamer, VLC etc. Go and check. Now, what did you claim?
Very good. Excellent.
One this page one can find the status of GLSL for the open source ATI video drivers:
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
“Mostly done” for R600 and R700 ATI chipsets.
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix
Neither GPGPU nor GLSL seems to be a possibility for the nouveau driver, however (open source nvidia driver).
Lemur2: this discussion is about Mac. Mac doesn’t have open-source ati drivers nor nouveau.
Sorry. I got out of context there for a moment.
http://geektechnica.com/2010/04/free-software-foundation-was-right/
Carry on.
Edited 2010-04-11 12:43 UTC
You can most definitley use OpenGL to accelerate flash. Cairo for example can use an OpenGL (or directx) backebd to accelerate vector drawing. You can also use shaders to accelerate video but why do that when most hardware can accelerate h.264 already which flash uses anyway.
Also there is opencl which can also be used to accelerate video and vector drawing. MS is using a lot of this technology in he next version of IE, even going as far as to bardware accelerate web page drawing calls, they are using directx for this. It defintiley possible, adobe just doesn’t want tondo the ork or abandon the code they already have to make it possible. That’s understable, flash is probably a lot of work, but the codebase is probably buckling under the weight. Macomedia probably never thought it would be used for hat people are actually using it (video).
Another argument for hardware accelerated flash http://www.scaleform.com/products/gfx using opengl, etc.
Scaleform actually lets you design your game UI in flash then export to your game engine and it all hardware accelerated and performance is phenomenal form what I’ve heard. So Adobe really has no excuses other than laziness.
I woud like to see an Apple’s made Photoshop competitor: PS has awesome tools, but the UI is so old now! And I’m quite sure that there is an app in Apple’s lab for that
But I don’t agree on your theory because Adobe will not stop supporting MacOS X: it would be childish, it wouldn’t serve Adobe’s own interest and it would then definitively push Apple at working on a Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign replacement while it is now only a possibility that they are already working on it. They could even purchase Corel’s assets to start with or whatever else.
Moreover, as Adobe is just launching now CS5, and considering that it is quite easy to skip one major version of Adobe CS, even designers on the Mac would have at least 3-4 years to prepare themselves to eventually migrate to Apple’s solution.
And if you add the fact that BootCamp or VMWare/Parallel would be able to run Windows only CS on a Mac, I definitively don’t think it would be wise from Adobe to play this game.
Edited 2010-04-10 13:02 UTC
Anyone know if the new Wireless App Distribution feature (http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/preview-iphone-os/) could allow users to circumvent the Appstore alltogether? Or is this some locked down enterprise only feature?
For me I could not care less about the Appstores restrictions if I suddenly was allowed to distribute my Apps to the consumers outside the Appstore.
Edited 2010-04-10 13:26 UTC
All CS5 does is build an executable with the whole flash interpreter statically linked in. Any flash apps build with CS5 would have been just as bad as flash apps displayed in WebKit, because the flash runtime IS AN ABSOLUTE STINKING PILE OF CRAP on any platform other then Windows.
Before I got flashblock, any site I would visit with flash adds would instantly send my processors to about %60, and the fans would start spinning (X3100 MacBook). The situation is even worse in Linux. Would you expect the flash runtime to be any better on the iPhone????
This is the exact same crap that Semantec pulled in the 90’s with their ‘java compiler’, they advertised a java dev tool that I paid about 150$ for that claimed to produce native executables. Well, technically it did, they produced an giant executable, with the entire java interpreter statically linked in, and your code statically linked in, so at runtime it would just interpret your code using the linked in interpreter.
Same freaking thing that CS5 does.
All Apple it trying to do is limit the number of crap applications. If there are all of a sudden all kinds of apps built on flash, battery life drops to minutes, then people will be pissed and most likely blame apple, when its flash’s fault.
And their probably is no way to even write a runtime for flash that will not drain battery, because flash is all timer based. The runtime needs to allocate all kinds of timers that are firing at a very fast rate, so there would be NO POSSIBLE WAY to suspend the app in a multitasking env.
BTW, my credentials: PhD candidate in Physics/Computer Science
Edit: I do think Apple went a bit too far, I think they should have allowed apps written in Python/Ruby or some other decent lang, but absolutely ban flash.
And BTW, what is more cross platform then C/C++ and Javascript???
Edited 2010-04-10 14:28 UTC
Your credentials don’t mean a lot if you’re unwilling to do a little basic research to ensure the accuracy of your comments. Adobe’s Packager for iPhone is a true compiler built using LLVM. You can read about it straight from the horse’s mouth here:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html
>If there are all of a sudden all kinds of apps built on
>flash, battery life drops to minutes, then people will
> be pissed and most likely blame apple, when its
> flash’s fault.
For sure this is not a technical decision. Out there are NOKIA phones which have support for Flash (e.g. Nokia N900) and their battery life is just fine.
Why is it that when a large organization does something that some people don’t like, it’s suddenly a conspiracy?
The idea that Apple is trying to push out Adobe altogether is ludicrous. Apple has a beef with Flash, certainly, but to push out Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and the rest is just silly.
Agreed.
You know that later today this “theory” about Apple making a Photoshop replacement and wanting to drop Adobe outright will be headlining dozens of other web sites as fact now.
Your article made no mention of the argument that the C/C++/Obj-C requirement was related to the multitasking implementation that Apple designed for iPhone OS 4.x
Is it safe to assume that you just assume it’s not true?
I haven’t look at it in detail but could there not be elements of truth to this?
Seems every story and ever company these todays is so full of knee jerk reactions and personal feelings and often lacking in facts.
Business is not like couple, moves are not based on feelings or anything. It would be stupid for Apple to stop Photoshop or anything else. And they won’t do so.
I’m anyway puzzled by Apple’s move; we’ll see how they will apply it. Sounds to me it only targets Flash. I mean, Apple is powerless against Android: the customers are so different ! If Apple starts to look down on Android, it might be the beginning of the death of the iPhone…
Adobe is making their money in the publishing world, photography only comes second. They recently succeeded in migrating many users away form Quark to InDesign and the whole workflow with PDF, networks, licenses, and an entire ecosystem of hardware, printing presses, software tools like Suitcase etc. are embedded into the printing world.
While Photoshop might be the CS’s flagship application, I’d argue that InDesign and Illustrator are much more significant in this area.
Apple wouldn’t only have to recreate the creative suite functionality but the integration, workflow and an entire backlog of legacy compatibility and integration in workflow and tools.
Adobe will never abandon the Mac platform just like Microsoft will never abandon the PC.
“Adobe will never abandon the Mac platform just like Microsoft will never abandon the PC.”
Agree even if I don’t see the similarity with Microsoft on the PC platform.
You may be true concerning Apple replacing Adobe workflow, but keep in mind that not all CS users need the whole stuff (I’m a photographer and I only use Photoshop).
Moreover, even if Apple should lose the publishing market, it would probably represent less than 10% of their revenue now which would be quickly compensated by the increasing revenue from iPhone/iPad and even Mac sold to consumers.
Not a big threat for Apple.
Edited 2010-04-10 15:31 UTC
Don’t under estimate the number of people running Photoshop who aren’t in the publishing industry. I know lots and lots of people on Mac’s who have it installed, either purchased like me, or pirated for ‘personal’ use. I know very few ‘serious’ Mac users who don’t have it installed.
I admit Photoshop is overkill in many cases as they only use it for minor editing or for a bit web design.
Still, I’ve been using it for nearly twenty years and have tried other applications and always returned to it. If there wasn’t a native Mac version it would be a very big deal for me and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of other users. At least we’d still have the current and old versions to fall back on until something better came along, or have to bite the bullet and run it under virtualisation on Parallels or Fusion.
Edited 2010-04-10 15:48 UTC
Microsoft already abandoned the PC to some extend. MS almost completely ditched PC/Windows as entertainment platform with the cancellation of all PC games development as most obvious example. Focus has shifted to the Xbox and WP7. (3rd party publishers like Valve with Steam are the only ones who keep the PC as entertainment device alive.)
I created an account especially to post about this topic, my first time on this site.
The real reason the language is there is Apple don’t want to have to vet and approve millions of ‘crap Apps’ created with point and click tools and have them fill up the App store.
Apple have recently purged hundreds, if not thousands of similar crap Apps from their store. I doubt that quality games made using Unity will be penalised. I do think that shovelware ported using CS5 from Flash based websites and Flash games will be refused, along with anything else made using CS5/Flash. This is Apple’s prerogative.
If Apple allowed Adobe to distribute a Flash player type App that could be opened automatically when users click on Flash on the iPhone, in a similar manner to Youtube links at the moment then all this could go away. Apple have decided not to allow this as they believe they are helping promote ‘open standards’ such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. as a side effect of their no-flash stance which is motivated by worries about the quality of the code (frequent crashes on Windows & especially Mac) and poor battery life from intensive processor usage.
Edited 2010-04-10 15:24 UTC
A crap app will still be a crap app independently of the programming language used to make it.
Crap apps, are crap apps. i don’t think anyone is arguing that fact. However applications hat are made to be used with a mouse that automagically get ported to the iphone is something that needs to be avoided. On top of that you need to curtail the number of apps that consistently perform poorly. Having a whole bunch of flash “developers” try to get their game into the appstore with no iPhone specific optimization (or touch specific anything), bad performance non-comfomity with Apple’s api’s (you know Apple likes to tun on a dime) avoids issues like apps not being compatible with a new version of the OS, or not supporting all of the features of the OS. This actually looks to be the case as Flash needs to have a constant timer (due to how it handles animation, etc) and that will basically conflict with how Apple implemented multitask in the OS as will as severely impact battery life on the device.
My take on this is that Apple is trying to force Adobe to either release the flash runtime as an open source standard so that they can implement it correctly in OSX/Iphone OS or they expect Adobe to actually do their f*ing job and implement flash correctly in the first place. Apple doesn’t seem to have any issues with the CS applications on its platform, Flash seems to be the biggest thing they harp on and with good reason. Adobe needs to open source the runtime so that everyone can implement it on their platform as they see best. If not that then they need to release a standard that everyone can implement and work with the the W3C to get it approved as a web standard so the it can be implemented by everyone, not just who Adobe feels like supporting and what kind of support they are bothered to give.
The point is that the barrier for entry is being kept artificially high to avoid an explosion of crap apps, not to avoid the idea of crap apps altogether. It’s a very interesting point!
Exactly. In total agreement. That’s basically the point I wanted to make put more concisely. It’s nothing to do with the conjecture that forms the main argument of the related article about Apple releasing a Photoshop competitor and wanting Adobe to leave the Mac platform.
“so you can’t say with a straight face that Adobe makes most of its money through Mac users. ”
This is just wrong, look it up 60% of all LEGAL Photoshop users are on the mac
Also Final cut studio does NOT have something to compete with After Effects, Motion does not even come close.
Adobe would loose a massive amount of there users if they dropper After effects, Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign from the Mac.
Face it most creative users are on a mac hmmm and what kind of software does Adobe make?
If I remember Apple announced Aperture, long before Adobe announced Light room. So who is trying to hurt who?
Umm. Shake wipes the floor with AfterEffects and most FX houses use Nuke anyway which runs on all 3 platforms. AfterEffects is downright clunky compared to those. Also Autodesk just ported their Smoke system to Mac (no Windows version). So yeah, there are plenty of (better) alternatives, to Aftereffects.
Either way I agree with you. While there are a lot more users on Windows, most are not actually paying customers. Most people I’ve seen using Adobe’s products actually pay for it. Not because they have to, but because they actually want to, as bad as some of the ports actually are. Adobe loosing willing paying customers to spite Apple is a stupid move, especially when they make up the majority and will buy your products no matter how many time you have screwed them over.
Shake is now discontinued. The replacement is Final Cut Studio.
But the article said the Final cut studio was the competitor to After effects, it is not. And I am actually Shake certified but learning Nuke. That being said I would still use After effects for motion graphics.
Sadly Shake is dead and no Motion is not a competitor at all for Shake. Apple no longer has a node based compositing solution. Final cut studio was NOT a replacement for Shake.
But ya AE vs Shake different tools for different jobs.
“Tired of iPad news?”
And if I am tired to see this message, how can I remove it ?
http://www.osnews.com/?not=apple
Fortunately you are not viewing it on an iPad, because if you were, you’d have only one browser, the one that came with it, and that would not have any ad block plugins, they having been banned from the store, and the makers of the iPad would have bought ad space in all your apps on the condition that you could not turn them off.
And they would play real loud.
So you would jolly well watch them ads and like them. And no you would not switch the thing off or turn the sound down, because the switches would have been disabled. This is the beauty of having ads turn into full fledged apps.
So, right now you can visit that link and turn the stories off. Enjoy it while you can. Not for much longer.
I really wish people wouldn’t make this out to be just about Adobe, i.e. quality of Flash, crucialness of their CS apps, whatever. The new licence is about banning whatever tools developers want to use, EVEN IF they are solely targetting CocoaTouch, e.g. with MonoTouch, Wax, or APPLE’S OWN MacRuby. Don’t worry, you’re not even supposed to think about how GL Shader Language isn’t on the list of approved languages.
Please do not distract from the issue.
The talk is that Apple had no choice but to make their restrictions so broad as to disallow all of those tools. Explicitly targetting Adobe while allowing the other tools would look extremely petty (not that that ever stopped Jobs, but whatever), if not illegal (though I doubt that). So the thinking is that yes, Apple is disallowing those other tools, but Adobe is the target; the others are simply collateral damage.
But I’m more inclined to agree with you. Apple isn’t explicitly targetting Adobe (though Jobs does seem to despise Adobe for whatever reason). They’re disallowing all cross platform tools because they don’t want iPhone devs making apps for any other platforms. Android is the real target here, not Adobe. Just as Android is the real target of Apple’s HTC suit.
Edited 2010-04-11 06:55 UTC
Is the people who are SURPRISED by any of this. Vendor lock-in has been the cornerstone of Apple’s business model ever since the Mac was introduced. You REALLY think they chose SCSI over MFM/IDE because of performance? When they went IDE do you think they reversed ground and master select because the drives worked better that way? So you think they didn’t connect four wires on their PCMCIA slots because it made their airport cards work better? EDO memory where the extra bits were NOT used for error checking but just as authentication you were using THEIR RAM? Using CPU’s in the iPhone and iPod Touch that have hardware h.264 support BUILT IN and then leaving the traces needed to use them unwired so that part of the chip is locked out? Hell, there’s a reason USB had to basically be shoved down their throats so far as support for it goes.
Hell, it’s the REAL reason they go for the art *** form factors since it lets them make it impossible to open, impossible to do a REAL upgrade on – see why the cheapest system they have you can plug a PCI or PCI Express card into is two and a half grand. Forces the majority of people using their products to have them configured Apple’s way, or not at all.
It’s why a decade ago when OSX was introduced I was shocked at them even THINKING about being involved in anything Open Source – it runs entirely contrary to their business practices of the past two decades. Of course, they’ve shown their true colors on Darwin more than once, code releases lagging a year or more behind the distributions; See the entire 10.4 line which they didn’t release the code for until 10.5 dropped.
As I’ve said before, if Microsoft tried HALF the monopolistic practices Apple does, you’d hear it cried from rooftops for years – give it a month and Apple will have it all swept under the rug.
Apple’s real motto should be “Our way, or not at all”
Though I do often have to question if it’s intentional malice, or technical ineptitude since we’re talking the company who underclocked the G3 chips 40% in the iBook so they could put them in insulating foam without a fan instead of putting a heat sink on them – always fun to open one of those up and find the hole burned clear through the dial-up adapter. Yank the dialup adapter, RF shield and foam, replace with a large copper heat sink, and your 266 G3 iBook can run at 400mhz after moving a couple resistors.
It’s why when people talk Apple quality, I wonder just exactly what’s in the kool-aid. The reality distortion field is apparently not a myth.
— edit —
Oh, and it’s still an absolute riot that the most DRM-laden anti-hacking anti-hobbyist company was founded by two phreakers. I wonder just how much Apple gave Woz for him to not be speaking out against them.
Edited 2010-04-10 18:56 UTC
Oops, past edit limit.
Just a thought – anyone taking bets on when they’ll apply the iPhone/iPod/Itampon model to the desktop version of the OS?
You know, remove the finder as ‘too complicated’ and force it so the only way you can install applications is through the app store?
Give them time – it’s probably their next step.
The get a mac ads are probably done. I think that Apple are waiting for iPad / developer growth to eventually release a replacement for the laptop or desktop (Imagine a 27″ iPad like an animator’s lightbox).
I can’t see them putting the screw on Mac OS X, too much momentum, nothing to gain. iPhone OS is the fabled “OS XIâ€, Apple will spend the next ten years winding down OS X.
There’s one good thing though: the more heinous, infamous, rascals, evil, scoundrels, bastards, jackasses they are, the faster the bubble will explode and the faster crApple will be history.
The irony is that the reason Apple can get away with their behavior is that they control both the hardware and OS (for Mac), and moreover dictate which apps can even run (for iPhone/Pad). So antitrust can’t touch them, no matter what they do, even if their devices get 90% marketshare.
The reason Microsoft ran afoul of antitrust is that they were more open than Apple, and licensed their OS to others (and made no restrictions on what apps could run (which Apple did for Mac but not for iPhone/pad)). This created a situation in which Microsoft became the 90% supplier of a component used in devices made by other companies, which brought antitrust laws into play. Had Microsoft been less open, if they’d been as closed and controlling as Apple, they’d have been in the clear. That’s the irony: by being less open, Apple stays clear of the law.
Thank You!
I think Thom should pick up your comment and spin a new article out of it!
Oh yes, that is such a beautiful irony.
From most perspectives, Apple is more open than Adobe.
When you write a Flash app, you’re locked into the platforms Adobe decides to support. And I’m not sure they’ve shown an ability to write a top-notch Flash client on anything but Windows. Furthermore, Flash is always going to be a layer between your application and the underlying system: your application is going to be a second-class citizen and stick out like a sore thumb compared to native applications.
When you write an iPhone app, you know what you’re getting: you’ll always run on the iPhone OS, the leading smartphone platform in the world. You’re not dependent on some runtime that may or may not be available on the platform you really want to be running on.
But wait – doesn’t that make Apple like Windows back in the 3.1-95 era?
No, because the HTML5 support in the iPhone OS is truly kickass. All standards-based.
So Apple gives you two very clear choices. You want to be a native app on the iPhone? You write an Obj-C app using their development tools.
You want to stay open and write a standards-based application that can run anywhere? Write it in HTML5.
So Apple limits you to two options, one of which has no freedom of language or even development tools and the other due to being non-native has limited functionality and subpar performance.
At least that’s how I see it.
Completely ridiculous conjecture, for so many reasons, some of which I will detail here:
– Adobe makes a substantial proportion of their income from sales of Creative Suite for Mac OS X. Apple may only have somewhere between 2% and 10% of the market for personal computers, depending on who you ask, but their market share among creative professionals is significantly higher. In 2008, Adobe blogger John Nack posted that the Mac OS X version of Photoshop accounted for almost 50% of sales for that application. In my specific industry and region, all of my employees, contractors, clients and competitors use Creative Suite on Mac OS X.
– Adobe would upset their major corporate customers by forcing them to migrate to the PC platform which would involve expensive hardware and IT infrastructure upgrades and even more expensive training, workflow and process changes. There are major international corporations with tens of thousands of Mac OS X boxes with Creative Suite installed. I’m not making this up – I used to work for such an organization. The major advertising agency holding companies alone could account for hundreds of thousands of sales of Creative Suite for Mac OS X. Neither Apple nor Adobe can afford to upset those major corporate customers.
– Creative Suite is so much more than just Photoshop. Creative professionals use many of the applications that comprise Creative Suite on a daily basis. Perhaps Apple intends to provide an alternative to Photoshop but it is unlikely that it is currently able or even interested in providing an alternative to the entire Creative Suite. Laypeople like to talk about and even purchase Photoshop but it’s really just a small part of the package. Creative Suite is more than just a number of applications. It is a workflow.
Adobe doesn’t want to stop selling Creative Suite for Mac OS X. Apple doesn’t want Adobe to stop either. When I hire a new employee in my business, the first thing I do is purchase a new Mac OS X system and a copy of Creative Suite. From the Apple Store. Yes, because Apple also sells Creative Suite.
Edited 2010-04-10 20:21 UTC
Let’s assume that Adobe abandons Mac.
If MS decides that crApple has gained too much momentum and it’s in its interest to slow it down a little, then they can give a helping hand. MS can cease to publish Office for Mac, sue Apple over some patents regarding iWork (so it can’t be an alternative for MS Office), sell Apple stock for nothing. Even if they lose some cash, it may worth it if they get rid of Apple.
How old are you? 12?
No.
Not actually sent from my IPad
Three years ago I converted to the Mac way of life, and since then I’ve even gotten my whole family and some of my friends to switch too. I was fed up with Windows and knew that Linux was still too limiting and frustrating. And for a while, I loved it.
But with Apple every day making more and more asshole moves, combined with the fact that my brand new 13″ MacBook Pro seems to be full of crap components (Wi-fi and Bluetooth reception is half of what it was in my 3-year old MacBook Pro, Airport is generally flake-tastic, plus the connection to the screen died after just a few months), I am really considering getting back out. I don’t want to support a company that screws over its third-party developers. I myself am a developer and I’m sorry, but I should have the choice of development tools that I use. So really, it seems I should probably get off the Mac before they start crippling it as they have the iPhone….
Edited 2010-04-10 22:32 UTC
It’s just a computer — not a lifestyle.
… because a big chunk of their products depend on PDF/PS technologies, which are owned by Adobe.
I think this is just Jobs’s runaway control freak OCD side getting out of hand. There are plenty of alternatives, so it is their prerogative… and I assume the board tolerates Jobs antics because he has a proven track record of success during the past decade. But let’s not forget that Jobs is also capable of monumental blunders (it took him over a decade to recover from the last time he screwed up big time).
I am thorned between the childishness of it all, and the fact that I at least respect Jobs for putting his skin in the game.
If Adobe will (and they may) leave Macs, Os X is likely doomed. What else can somebody do an a Mac? Play videos? Browse the web? They can do it on Linux for a fraction of the cost. When the large horde of creatives will leave Os X, crApple will be left just with fanboys. Creatives need tools like Photoshop and Indesign, not Os X.
Photoshop, for example, is so advanced that it will take years, and years from somebody to make anything near its actual state. If somebody could have written a Photoshop replacement, than he already have done it.
I know that everybody thinks that crApple is magic and Jobs will push some replacements for Adobe’s products from his hat, but it’s actually not the case.
And why will people follow Adobe instead using some iJunk that crApple may release? Because Photoshop and Indesign are industry’s de facto standards, because there isn’t and can’t be any replacement.
I agree that if Adobe were to abandon the Mac, Mac users would follow suit pretty quickly. However I don’t think it’s out of the question that Apple could develop a Photoshop alternative. Just look at it this way: InDesign was a brand new product in 1999, and yet within just a few years it managed to push Quark from the top spot. For all we know Apple has been working on a Photoshop/Illustrator alternative for years now. In fact, they already have a lot of the necessary groundwork for something like that done in the form of Quartz Extreme and Keynote. Add to that a Flash killer in the form of an HTML5 authoring app based off of SproutCore and WebKit technologies, and there you have it–a near-complete CS5 competitor, in all likelihood with a lower learning curve.
Would I buy it? No, because I hate OS lock-in. (Part of the reason why I prefer to use Premiere and Cubase instead of Final Cut and Logic.) However, I can imagine there might be a lot of takers for an Apple-ized Creative Suite competitor (much like there are with Final Cut and Logic). To me, Apple’s Pro products offer very few advantages over the competition to the effect that I would be willing to lock myself into Apple’s platform. However, I know plenty of other “Apple faithful” who see things differently.
I don’t think anyone here realizes how much Adobe makes from selling their software suites to creative industries.
You might balk at the $600 price tag for illustrator or photoshop but media outlets all over the world have no problem spending the money and usually buy the Mac version. I read somewhere that 90% of newspaper companies use Macs.
As for Apple they don’t have it out for Adobe, they’re just protecting their app store revenue. Apple not only makes money from apps but also by selling movies and tv shows. Allowing Flash on their idevices would cut deeply into that revenue.
Edited 2010-04-11 04:36 UTC
This isn’t about disallowing Flash. It’s about preventing devs from programming in Flash and then using a tool to compile that into a native iPhone app using Adobe’s upcoming converter. And about preventing similar functionality for other tools (like Monotouch, which (from what I understand) compiles C# .NET code into a native iPhone app).
The article question was “Is Apple betting on Adobe ditching the Mac?” and I explained why Adobe would never leave Apple. I think you read too much into my post.
Edited 2010-04-11 16:04 UTC
So they must resort to anti competitive practices? That’s it? Apple is allowed to do anything just because they want more money?
Why are they screwing developers? Just for business?
Hmm, maybe because despite all the bitching, developers do they are still developing for the platform?
There’s no law against locking out competition from your own platform or being a prick to your partners. Anti-trust laws wouldn’t apply to Apple because they don’t have a monopoly on smartphones. It’s their platform, they can do what they want.
If their actions bother you then don’t support the company. They can’t hold on to their app store profits forever anyways. At some point the market will be flooded with cheap smartphones that run cross-platform applications and Flash video. They’re just trying to hold onto their profits for as long as possible.
This also isn’t the first time they have pissed off developers who were using outside tools. There was also that Java incident a few years ago where they broke most Java applications with an update. They have a history of being lame about cross platform development. Just look at how much they focus on objective C and Xcode when there are free toolkits like Qt that have a much better ide.
When Jobs released Keynote, he didn’t first screw Microsoft over to get them to drop PowerPoint for the Mac so that Keynote would have no competition. He just released it. And Mac faithful, which buy whatever Jobs tells them to, bought it. And those Mac users that aren’t of the Mac faithful still use Mac PowerPoint or Keynote, depending on what’s best for their needs. Seems that the same would happen for a Photoshop competitor.
I’ll also add that my sypmathy for Adobe is limited since they did threaten to sue Microsoft in the EU for adding PDF and XPS export functionality in Office 2k7, which forced Microsoft to strip that functionality and provide it instead in the form of a free downloadable plugin. At the time, Adobe said that they’d allow Microsoft to ship PDF/XPS export functionality built-in only if Microsoft raised the price of Office 2k7 to a level such that Adobe’s monopoly on Office-to-PDF export functionality wasn’t harmed, which amounts to one company demanding that another collude with it in price fixing. So it’s not like Adobe is above playing games and abusing their market position. However, with Office 2k7 SP1, Microsoft did include PDF and XPS export functionality and Adobe stayed silent, so I’ve forgiven (but not forgotten) their earlier transgression. lol
Anyway, I don’t think Apple’s move with the iPhone OS4 SDK is about a Photoshop competitor. I go with Occam’s Razor, which is that Apple wants to make it as difficult as possible for developers to target multiple platforms rather than exclusively the iPhone OS. I do agree that Apple will release a Photoshop competitor (Jobs can’t stand any non-Apple product dominating an application space on the Mac), but there’s no scheme to first goad Adobe into dropping Mac support.
I think everyone should get used to the fact that it’s Steve Jobs’s world, and we’re just living in it. I laugh at those that claimed for years that Apple was this angelic company with wings on its shoulders and halo over its head. It’s been clear for years that Apple is much more draconian than Microsoft ever was, they just didn’t have the power to exercise it widely (though they did indeed exercise it in the Mac world). But now everyone is seeing the power of the fully operational battle station. Apple controls the hardware, the OS, the development tools, and dictates what 3rd party apps can run. No other platform is like that, that I can think of. (There are other platforms that are pretty closed, like video game consoles and Windows Phone 7, but they don’t forbid cross platform dev tools or dictate the programming language.)
It is funny because when I came to the Apple World it was different, but not Much and the first thing I noticed it that While Microsoft was in court for being a Monopoly Apple clearly was a monopoly from the Mouse to the Screen from soup to nuts Apple want to control the interface, the look and feel. And overall the effect has not been bad. It just has been a transition. There was the Apple of 1998 and the Apple of 2008 and even more so in 2010. The thing is many of us still view the Mac in that 1998 stench of ‘teh suk’ is gone. I really hope Apple doesn’t get greedy.
Apple has had this fight internally with the Quicktime group when they switched over to OS X. And the quicktime toolkits were hogs. They worked in OS 9 but would throw a spinning beach ball in OS X. Well there is No Doubt that internally Apple has their own Flash implementation and unless they buy adobe it will not see the light of day. Maybe this has something to do with all of the times that Adobe tried to buy Apple. Could be Jobs rubbing Warnocks face in it.
As much as I’d love it if Adobe had the balls to drop all support of OSX (how good would the blood bath be!) it’s not going to happen. There’s way too much revenue in the Mac as a platform for Adobe.
Agreed with others that this move is about platform lock-in – pure and simple. Adobe CS5 is just one of the impacted alternative iphone app platforms.
Apple wants exclusive apps.
OK the way that I see this is segmented.
One I heard this waaay back in the day (when AppleWorks was still an app and Apple stock was <8 USD/share) I felt then that Apple should make its own office suite. As opposed to having an outside source dominate the mindshare. At along the same time Apple had Netscape (*remember me*) and MSIE / for the mac. Just having the latter on my machine made it less stable. – I Suspect that the MS .TTF fonts were not fully tested on the target OS. And the cause is a matter of debate the effect was a simple correlation: having one of these Apps on any of our test macs invalidated the test. BUT we would still have to test that these apps would work as advertised even if the MSIE was installed. – I Believe the mindset was that Apple was going do just go away one day. Many companies and techies feel that on some level.
Recently Apple released iWork and iLife and Aperture. iLife is nice because many users would like to use the refreshed apps without buying a new Mac or an OS Bundle. But the thing that iWork, which is a direct (but much More evolved) descendant of Appleworks, did not do was make Microsoft Office redundant. And I suspect that Aperture will not eliminate the Adobe Creative suite. That is not what it is designed for. We All Have Too Much Invested in that. I have no love for Adobe, I am not a designer anymore but I am very comfortable in it. I can do everything that I need to do based on muscle memory and keystrokes. And I know what hand my bread is buttered with.
But here is the funny thing about Aperture, is that it is built on Core Graphics, the foundations and the hooks are written in the OS. It would not be trivial but it is possible to write an image editing app in Core Graphics and Core Data. The real issue then is that whatever comes after the next (overpriced and overhyped) version of Adobe Creative Suite will have to compete with.
In the Apple Ecosystem Apple thrives by not making a Professional grade Office or Desktop Publishing suite. In this space Apple functions as a HW vendor. They are not trying to phase out the people who feel that they need Adobe or Microsoft. Apple is trying to protect their ecosystem/economy/revenue model. A last concrete model is MAPI and Entourage. Microsoft used to have a real version of Outlook for the Mac with .PST and .PAB support back in 2001 and then we had Entourage. Which is a failure on so many levels. I have had bosses and co-workers want to switch all of the desktops to Mac and many companies want to use Macs in the business world but couldn’t because of a serious lack of exchange support. Now in the end Apple solves these vendor deficiencies in house by licensing MAPI and then Microsoft catches religion and releases Outlook for Mac ten years late.
I have replaced MS Office for the Mac, And I have never used Photoshop/CS 3 ‘for fun’. I am just as likely to open a small and tidy app like Graphic Converter to do some Q&D work. As a matter of fact the Apple Apps if anything have probably cut down the amount of (App thievery/piracy) that go on in these bloated app suites.
Cringely has a funny post this week http://www.cringely.com/2010/04/masters-tournament
I think apple wants out of the computer market where applications are installed on a desktop by a user.
They want to piss off Adobe now, sure. But more importantly…
They don’t care what happens if Adobe pulls the plug on support for Mac OS. Apple wants MacOS to go away.
They’ll keep the desktops / laptops on life support, but increasingly move to a more ‘device’-oriented product line. The MacOS as we know it today will be gone in a short time. The MacBook will go away, or be replaced by a more ‘device like’ system that uses the App Store.
Independent distribution of software will be gone, prohibited, and you’ll love it. Because Steve Said So.
Lindows “Click N’ Run” meets subjective monopolistic distribution overlord.
Think the exact opposite.
Apple wants to be in the general computer desktop more and more. They want to actually expand their solutions to traditional and new solutions to non-traditional markets.
It truly is amazing the number of people crapping on about how terrible it is that there is no Flash on iPhone and yet have never used a Mac in their entire lives; it appears that as soon as Apple does something they become over night experts in the are of Mac OS X software development. How many go about defending Adobe and have never experienced the unfortunate pleasure of using Adobe products on Mac OS X with the Flash plugin being the the cr̬me de la cr̬me of el-crapo programming Рthe ability for a single solitary plugin to bring so much pain and misery to such a large base of people that the average ActiveX exploit writer could only dream of.
If Adobe fixed their damn plugin then Apple would have less of a leg to stand on so instead they bribe and threaten media companies, they sabotage the development of HTML5, fund a well orchestrated mud raking campaign against Apple that even Microsoft wouldn’t have done in the 20+ years they have been in their position of dominance – but some how people are willing to give Adobe a free pass where as Microsoft would have been slammed if it conducted such behaviour.
Edited 2010-04-12 04:33 UTC
I think you are missing the point, as are many people replying to this article and the article itself for that matter.
All this coming from a policy change by Apple of which the primary purpose, as we are lead to believe, is to disallow Adobe from Flash’ifiing (look ma’, I verb’ified a brand) the iPhone “app market”.
This new policy stipulates (in loosey-goosey terms) that if your code wasn’t initially written in Obj-C, C, C++ or Javascript he resulting package will not be accepted it for distribution.
Oh my god I’m getting to the point right… now: Everyone is focusing on the Apple’s desktop OS and Adobe’s software endeavors therein. Now the conspirists (which doesn’t seem to be a word) are all concocting theories of Apple’s, or more specifically Steve Job’s, underlying intentions when really all that is happening is most likely this (please bare with me, I wanted to fit a fat kid analogy in here):
*** In the schoolyard one sunny afternoon ***
Adobe (Fat kid): I want to play with you and all your friends
Apple (Skinny, slightly hip kid): But your fat, everyone he’s fat, don’t play with him, he’ll harm you and your kitty.
Adobe (Fat kid): But I know all the games and am really good at them when I’m not falling over or holding everyone back and the schoolyard rules say I can play if I wear insulated padding.
Apple (Skinny, slightly hip kid): I just changed the rules, piss off fatty.
Me (sexy narrator): While the skinny and fat kid work well together in art class (Mac OS) in the schoolyard (iPhone OS) the skinny kid makes the rules and he doesn’t want some fat kid messing with his fun.
Moral of the story, fat kid analogies are fun and informative even if the don’t make sense or bear any relevance to the source material.
Now for some context, from the Adobe’s CS5 webpage (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/):
Is this the same “buggy” browser embedded JIT Flash plugin that people love to hate on the Mac OS?
I’m pretty sure software strategies for Mac OS and iPhone are separate and (by nature of medium) significantly different, but maybe I’m just a gullible sheep.
But how would they find out? if someone has used Flash and then converted all of it to some other language, how will they know it has been converted from one to another barring an obvious comment: “this code has been converted from its original Flash code” somewhere in the source code.
Which has nothing to do with the fact that Adobe makes crap desktop software thus it’ll spill over into crap applications on the iPhone – don’t delude yourself that some how Adobe will magically lift the game when it comes to producing a quality product. They failed to do it with the desktop and they’ll fail miserably when it comes to producing a development tool for the iPhoneOS. Their crappy development tool will produce crappy code which will then end up with crappy products on the iPhoneOS and guess who gets blamed when the experience is crap – you guessed it, Apple gets blamed. Apple will get blamed just like Microsoft gets blamed for all the incompetent half baked crap from third parties too lazy to provide updates or programme according to best practices.
Edited 2010-04-12 07:57 UTC
What has become clear in recent years is that Adobe NEEDS competition in the Photoshop and Illustrator field. There’s nothing that comes even close to what those two applications offer. ‘Why do these apps need serious alternatives then?’, you might ask. Well, for one, Adobe has more and more been pulling a Microsoft in the recent years as they have a quasi monopoly in the graphic design world. The only competition they have is Quark in the DTP domain.
I would hate to see Mac versions of Photoshop and Illustrator dropped but I’d love to see some competition there.
Two things though:
– I think Apple would have to acquire something existing to start offering Illustrator like software (I don’t think they can pull this off from scratch)
– It’d be foolish on Adobe’s part to drop the Mac platform because you can bet your bottom dollar that the legitimate vs. pirated install ratio looks prettier than on the Windows platform
I’d rather see more competition for Apple in the smartphone field.
For the most part Adobe’s software gets the job done and creative industries have no problem paying for it. Industry specific software like Illustrator is very expensive to develop which is why Adobe dominates so many creative sectors. Adobe isn’t highly profitable either. If they were then you would see other companies invest in alternatives to their creative suites.
But I would like to see Adobe lose their dominance when it comes to Flash.
Boy! First non-user replaceable batteries and now this, plus their random app store acceptance process to begin with.
Dunno what’s up with Apple any more, but they’re pretty much entirely off my relevance chart any longer, of course they really were a while ago given their crazy pricing/feature ratios for Macs & notebooks. Just wasn’t worth it for OSX to me as it’s a HEFTY tax to get OSX not to mention I just couldn’t swallow their notebooks’ minimal GPU specs even at the high end for those prices, but the battery not be replaceable was at tops as I usually go through a battery in 2-3y but tend to keep my nbs for 5-6y.
Apple has just gone too far with what seems to me a planned obsolescence of their products in what I consider to be far too short of time periods for their pricing levels. It’s like buying a car that is programmed to self-destruct in 3y or cost a significant portion of it’s sales price to keep running longer…
I just can’t really see Apple growing their customer base with these policies/pricings.
Except they do.
As for obsolescence: My Nov 2002 Powerbook G4 (yes, G4 as in Titanium G4) is still going strong, my GF uses it every day. Sure, she’s sort of stuck with OS X 10.4.10 but on that she’s working intensively with Indesign and Photoshop (both apps open pretty much all the time). Again, it’s the CS2 versions but it gets her work done.
Quite a few of my friends are quite happily using “obsolete” Apple hardware. I’m on 3 year old MBP and have been eyeing the new models once in a while just to decide that I don’t actually NEED any of them. And I am demanding on the hardware (no gaming though, I wish I had time for that).
You got one of the most evil companies fighting head to head with one that has been ruining the internet for years. Only good can come…. I hope.
Don’t you mean two evil companies are fighting head to head?
Apple was voted the most liked company this year, not of just tech companies, but of all companies.
I’m not a huge MS fan, but it’s like Microsoft kills a fly and gets censured while Apple has Michael Vick style dog fighting in it’s backyard and everyone just makes excuses for it instead of being offended.
How many of these acts against it’s users and developers will be tolerated? How long will Apple’s draconian control of it’s devices and software be allowed?
Don’t buy an iPad, get a Tablet PC, or the new HTC device coming out, you’ll be happier in the long run. Don’t buy an iPhone, get an Android or Kin, or 7 Series. If you’re looking for a Windows alternative look at SUSE Linux or even Ubuntu.
The bottom line is that you will not be able to do as much with an Apple device as any other, because of Apple’s ceaseless tightening of control.
Adobe can’t discontinue Mac software. Probably 40% of their revenue comes from Mac users.
For years Flash on the Mac has been total garbage. Everytime Safari crashes on me, Flash is always in the back trace. Adobe was also very slow updating their apps for Mac OS X and Cocoa, even slower than Microsoft. Adobe has treated Apple like a second class citizen for over a decade. Now they get to the pay the price.
I have been an avid reader of OS News for many years, have gone through multiple OS products throughout the years ranging from Windows enterprise software development, High Performance Computing Administration on Linux clusters exceeding 5000 processors, and now to graphic and layout design on Mac. I have never to date actually commented on a post, but this is a topic I must chime in on.Â
If Apple ever runs off Adobe, it will be doomed as a computer company. The real bread and butter is the design industry, myself included, who pay for the priviledge of having that shiny new MacPro. It’s not all just for looks; Apple hardware features legendary reliabilty that PC manufacturers can only dream of. Mac OS X has features that make our lives so much easier as designers, and it’s networking ability (mostly from it’s BSD/Unix core) has features that Windows networking lacks enately. But your iPod totting hipster with his white MacBook doesn’t pay the bills for R&D, the MacPro buyer does. Yes, Apple did drop “computer” from it’s name, but everyone has always referee to them as Apple anyway.Â
I’m not here to attempt to convert anyone, and I never would push my OS in you. I am a loyalist, but I also can’t stand the Mac “fan-boys”. What I am here to discuss is that Apple needs Adobe as much as Adobe needs them.Â
Just for a second let’s remember that Flash wasn’t created by Adobe, but a little forgotten company named Macromedia. I’m my opinion, Adobe aquired Macromedia for Dreamweaver, not for Flash. Flash was just a wart growing on Macromedia’s portfolio. Remember Shockwave? It has since been killed off by Adobe as useless, but Flash on the otherhand can’t be killed as easily. Killing Flash would be like Microsoft killing off C++ in favor of .NET. While newer technologies than Flash (insert HTML5 here) have come along, as all software developers know, legacy stuff is hard to kill when it has a large following, even if that legacy code is junk.Â
Adobe has never really spent the time or money to fix flash right. Why? Who knows. Flash on Windows is just as buggy as Flash on a Mac. It’s not necessariy the code being run (ie the web app) but the virtual machine runtime environment. If Apple was trying to kill off Flash all together, then Safari wouldn’t support it, but it does. I think Apple is trying to make a statement that Flash is not stable or optimized enough to run properly on the i* mobile platform. I don’t hear anyone complaining that they can’t write Java apps for the iPhone, so why this huge push for Flash? The answer; Flash is a crutch. (flame wars begin). Flash makes it simple and dirty for someone to code something like, say, Farmville, for multiple platforms quickly. Could it be done in other languages?Yes, are they better? Maybe. The reason Flash still has a hold is that for a long time Flash was the only game in town. For those of you who remember when Flash hit the market the only other option was a full Java applet, which in the days of dialup made Flash look amazingly good because it had a smaller footprint.Â
Adobe could probably do a bit better at it’s implementation of te flash runtime, but why really. As someone mentioned CS makes the money, not flash…