… with this rare post on Apple’s website.

I’m afraid I have to take umbrance with some of his points:

First, there’s “Open”.

Apple is not open. Using freeBSD doesn’t make it open. Creating WebKit doesn’t make it open. Implementing sandboxed Objective C with a locked down API doesn’t make it open. And stopping developers using their platform of choice to develop for the iShiny platform does not make it open. Heck, even the approval process for the appstore is a black box.

This is a marketing trick from the master of marketing.

He says Apple is open and Adobe isn’t but neither is open. The difference is that Adobe doesn’t make money on every application I make with the free and Open Source Flex SDK and the free FlashDevelop editor I use whereas Apple does make money on every app I sell through the only channel available to me as an iPhone dev.

 Second, there’s the “full web”.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

 In other words, we want you to use / buy apps from our impenetrably closed appstore and not Flash applications and games which we make no money on. When iAd launches, all advertising will be through them and then they will make money on the apps I create and sell for free.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Apple has only just recently given Adobe any kind of help in giving Flash hardware acceleration and Adobe has leapt on it in a non-lazy, thankyouverymuchsquire kinda way with Gala.

Another point that is glossed over is JavaScript’s performance as a scripting language. I’ll be the first to admit that Flash has caused my old mac to slow down a fair amount when chugging through someone’s enthusiastic but ultimately poorly-written code but it’s only been in the last couple of years that JavaScript has been executing with any kind of vigour at all! In Don Jobbso’s perfect HTML5 world, where all scripting is JavaScript, we’ll all be moaning about web-designers wanting too much from that instead of Flash. The current tests for HTML 5 aren’t that great and who knows where we’ll be with Flash in 3-5 years when HTML5′ll actually be ready for general use.

Fourth, there’s battery life.

Well, Google has been working closely with Adobe to make sure that Flash has as little impact on the battery life of their Android phones as possible. So have many handset manufacturers. Apple has not. If Apple was sincere about this point then they would be involved, if only to see how it was going.

 Fifth, there’s Touch.

Now this is where this turns from a scathing attack to simple FUD. Don Jobbso’s assertions that Flash isn’t multitouch compatible is simply incorrect. And to say that if devs have to rewrite their sites to use it then why don’t they move them over to HTML5 is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, instead of changing your keyboard, why don’t you buy a whole new computer? That said, I’m sure Don Jobbso would like you to buy a new computer.

Sixth, the most important reason.

And finally…

 Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.

This is the crux of Herr Jobs final point. He stresses that cross compiled code is bad although this isn’t bourne out by the fact that the latest version Unity 3d will support cross compilation from iPhone to Xbox 360 to Android. Unity does go through Xcode, however, but there’s still some double-standards there.

For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

This is unreal. It seems that Apple doesn’t hold itself to the same standards as it holds Adobe. Apparently Adobe needed to get all of their code up to date but Apple doesn’t need to do anything about iTunes or Final Cut Pro, both of which are still Carbon applications or the fact that OSX itself only went Cocoa with 10.6. It seems that it’s Apple rather than Adobe lagging behind. And let’s not talk about when the print industry, which was heavily influenced by QuarkXpress which refused to convert to Carbon (much less Cocoa) with version 5, moved wholesale to Adobe InDesign on mac. Why? Because Adobe, having seen that Apple, reinvigorated by a newly reistated Don Jobbso, was worthwhile supporting, moved over to the still-infant operating system!

Oh and by the way, I’m not your developer.

What happened to you, Apple? You used to be cool.

When Apple was the underdog to the behemoth Microsoft, it’s cheeky jabs and plucky obstinance were gleeful and appealing but now that Apple has become the big kid on campus, it turns out that the cocky rebel was just another big bully after all.

Shame really.

EDIT: The BBC have taken a brief response from Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen.

EDIT: I found a side by side comparison of the HTML5 canvas tag and Flash Player 10.1 on a desktop computer and a Google Nexus One here.

EDIT: Here is the WSJ’s interview with Shantanu Narayen.

Tags: Adobe, Apple, Flash, geek

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 4:58 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.