Friday, April 9, 2010

Apple pours salt on Adobe's wound...


In a further attempt to crush Adobe, Steve Jobs has announced that starting Monday (coincidentally the same day as the Adobe CS5 launch event) you will no longer be able to dial the number 5 from your iPhone. Steve Jobs states that the number 5 is buggy and has lead to 92% of all iPhone crashes.

This couldn't be true right? Of course not... but it is only slightly more ridiculous than his decision to prevent the use of the Flash iPhone packager. There are a lot of developers out hear that didn't want to have to take sides in the Adobe/Apple war... but we are taking a lot of shrapnel from Apple's F-You grenades.

I for one will be focusing on AIR development for every other phone and if I have to learn Silverlight to support Windows Phone 7, then I will.

This certainly doesn't make me want to go spend $3000 on a Mac, then pay for the privilege of becoming an "iPhone" developer, then spend a ridiculous amount of time learning a language that's only other use is for supporting a single minority (talking Mac vs. Windows here) platform, then spend tons of time building the next great mobile application which will need to ported to Flash anyway to support all the other phones, only to have it take forever to be reviewed by the App Store nazis and finally get rejected because Steve Jobs doesn't like the color Red (or some other undisclosed reason).

Ok... I'm done ranting for today. Now I will go back to checking out the HP Slate

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Source Wars begins : Revenge of the Dev !!!

Rob McKeown said...

While it is tempting to suggest that Adobe just stop supporting Mac, Adobe realizes that the real victim would be the designers... not Apple. I think Adobe will take the high road and not go down that path. Adobe doesn't want to screw their customers.

Apple on the other hand is doing the equivalent of the bad guy in the movie who kills an innocent person to prove to his enemy how tough he is. Steve Jobs doesn't care about collateral damage if it suits his agenda. While this move hurts Adobe for sure... it hurts us developers more and shows how unimportant us "little guys" are.

I for one would like to see Adobe crank out some kick-ass tools (Slider, Flashbuilder plugin to emulate various phones, etc.) for supporting other mobile platforms so it is super easy to support others first.

Teddy Matayoshi said...

$3000? Hmmm welcome to 2010. MacBook's capable of developing iPhone apps are like $900. You don't need a full blown Mac Pro. Apple is protecting their platform and end user experience same way as Adobe. iPhone is only one platform, it's the biggest mobile platform by far, so if you don't like developing native iPhone apps then there's always Android, Windows 7 etc. Lee Brimelow shouting "Go Screw Yourself, Apple!" will not make Apple put Flash on the iPhone. I love Flash, Flash animator myself but I love the iPhone / iPad platform as well. Revolutionary platforms and the rest are copy cats. You can't beat the original the same way that you can't reinvent the airplane, the Wright Brothers already did that. You can, if you will, improve the user experience.

Rob McKeown said...

Perhaps I exaggerated the cost of Mac but you can't deny that Macs are way more expensive than a PC. It also doesn't change the fact that as a developer I still need to buy into the developer program and that Apple can decide to deny my app based on whatever criteria they happen to be going on that day.

I agree...I don't think what Lee said is going to get Steve Jobs to change his mind. What I do think is that Apple's decision is really not in the best interest of consumers or developers which is the reason they won't change their mind.

I happen to love Adobe's products and Apple's products so I am not necessarily anti-Apple.

As far as copy cats... you must be forgetting that Apple copied the Xerox PARC Alto computer. That is the whole point of innovation and progress. You use what you know about existing successes and failures to achieve something better. This is exactly what Apple has done. Don't forget that the Tablet PC was announced by Microsoft in 2001... Apple didn't invent it. Even the Wright Brothers weren't the first to fly. John Stringfellow flew a fixed-wing airplane 50 years earlier. And planes have most certainly been improved since then.

I have read countless blog posts and can't find one that actually has a good argument for why iPhone apps shouldn't be built with Flash iPhone Packager. All the arguments seem to mistakenly think that it is a code generator which it isn't. A lot of arguments point to dissatisfaction with Flash Player... which the iPhone Packager doesn't use. It is really as if nobody took the time to even understand what it is which is a real shame. There are probably Objective-C developers that would like it.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.