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Adobe halts investment in iPhone-specific Flash dev tools, has another dig at Apple (update: Apple responds)
Color us unsurprised, but it's still notable to hear that Adobe is stopping investment in its software's capability to port content over to iPhone OS. The company's great hope on this front, Packager for iPhone, will still ship as part of Flash CS5 as planned, but beyond that Adobe is essentially giving up on Apple's mobile OS until further notice. In spite of being repeatedly rebuffed by Jobs and company before, the Flash maker had kept up hope that it could sway (or nag) Apple into validating its wares, but the final straw in this relationship seems to have been Apple's dev tool lockdown. So what will Adobe do now? Principal Product Manager Mike Chambers tells us that Android is doing kind of okay and his company will shift its attentions to it and other mobile platforms. Of course, we're just giving you the cleaned up version -- for the full finger-pointing diatribe against Apple, you'll have to hit the source link. Update: Right on cue, here's Apple's terse response: "Someone has it backwards--it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe's Flash is closed and proprietary."
Steve Jobs responds directly to developer over new iPhone SDK rules, cites blog for explanation
Plenty ink has already been spilled about the new restrictions in clause 3.3.1 of the new iPhone SDK terms of use. The new wording disallows developers to use third party, cross platform development tools (like Flash CS5) to build their apps, and plenty of folks (like Adobe) are angered by it. Now it seems Steve Jobs has chimed in as well. Developer Greg Slepak reached out to Steve, citing the large outpouring of negativity on the topic, including a post by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who Greg calls Apple's "biggest fan." Steve apparently responded, citing a newer post by Gruber that explains Apple's theoretical reasoning for locking down the platform like this. Steve called the post "very insightful." When Greg replied, raising some very legitimate defense that highly popular, important apps like Mozilla Firefox are built with cross platform frameworks, Steve Jobs had a slightly less terse response: We've been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform. On Greg's blog he breaks down some of Gruber's claims and makes a pretty compelling case for third party toolkits -- important examples of which can be found all over the Mac and Windows landscape. We get the feeling his impassioned pleas, and the oft-bandied threat of developer migration, will fall on deaf ears at Apple as always, but at least he helps shape this debate somewhat, which will no doubt rage on for months and years to come. Check out the full conversation between Greg and Steve, including Greg's final response, after the break.
Adobe lets you use Flash to create... non-Flash apps for the iPhone
Notably (or not so notably) absent from this week's mobile announcements out of Adobe's Flash camp is the iPhone, a platform that many want to see pick up official Flash support for a number of totally valid reasons -- but realistically, the gap between Adobe's stance and Apple's stance on the subject seems no closer than it did in 2007. The solution? Let developers make Flash apps for the iPhone and convert 'em over to native code prior to submission to the App Store. Of course, this effectively means that there's nothing "Flash app" about these Flash apps, but if nothing else, it lets devs apply their existing knowledge and code libraries in a way that'll make Apple happy and get real, native apps out to users without the muss and fuss of a manual port. The apps look pretty cheesy compared to most purpose-suited iPhone apps, but skeptics should note that there are already 8 apps live in the App Store that were compiled this way -- Adobe boasts that it's a 100 percent acceptance rate so far -- and the Flash CS5 dev environment required to make it happen should be available as a public beta "later this year." Pretty cool, but no, seriously... how about real Flash, Apple?
