max-width.Sixth, the most important reason.This seemed to me the disingenuous bit. If the "third party platform" supplies a bad experience to users, missing out on the cool platform features, why not leave it to the user to abandon it or not?
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
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.
Who knew cross-platform would become a bad word?People who have to use cross-platform Java apps.
But at the same time, people still bought Adobe products because even though they were not the best citizen on the Macintosh desktop, the alternatives were usually worse.Which is why most of the iThing users I know use Apple products. Turtles all the way down.
Perhaps the most painful part of this for developers with large Carbon code bases (poor Adobe... ) is that Apple did, in fact, port Carbon to 64-bit. There were sessions on it at WWDC 2006, and the code appeared in Leopard seeds. The decision to drop 64-bit support for Carbon was obviously a hard one to make, but eventually it was made, despite the work already put into the effortSo Adobe didn't even know that they were supposed to go Cocoa until 2007. It's really only been three years since you guys dropped the bomb, and it's not particularly shocking that Adobe would wait to integrate full Cocoa support with the 64-bit transition. They are, after all, managing three platforms; 32-bit Windows, 64-bit Windows, and OS X. Keeping releases in sync, when one codebase is changing so dramatically, is not an easy thing to do.
I'm not talking minor things like placing items on the page. I'm talking choices of color that had nothing to do with HTML and everything to do with an appalling taste. Rather: An apathy towards developing taste.Well, I think that's a minority view. I've never heard anyone else complain about the colors people chose; rather it was the layout and the fact that everything was a horrible cludge. Most people can at least pick good colors, it's pretty intuitive. The problem was that while myspace allowed you to "tweak" things it didn't allow you to do it in a way that made sense, even to developers or graphic designers. The result: Disaster.
Remember that screen resolution comes out of RAM - so the iPAd might theoretically have the same 256Mb as you 3GS, but actually it's less.The iPad only has 256mb of ram total.
Almost no major cellphone maker whose products you see on the shelves of Verizon or AT&T makes RAM a selling point. Very few cellphone buyers know or care what RAM is,The more ram you have, the more complicated your programs can be. An average user might not see the connection, but its there.
The interesting thing about Apple is how very quickly they raise the baseline. It wasn't too many years ago when you couldn't get a single phone that wasn't a frustrating exercise in bullshit. Now that there's really a pretty great one, it's all "yes, but it isn't open".You couldn't really get an open phone IN THE US. Mainly because the carriers wanted to keep their locked-down ringtone markets. I think there were a few expensive "serious business" phones that technically could be programmed (like windows mobile/blackberry) but they weren't consumer focused at all.
This is meant to please any non-techies wondering about it, I think. What's interesting is that Jobs hardly mentions what I think must be the real reason for wanting to kill Flash: because Adobe insists on keeping it to a 32-bit binary, whereas Apple seems to be looking to move to an exclusively 64-bit platform.64 bit machines aren't faster then 32 bit machines unless you're dealing with programs that use a lot of 64 bit integers. Most programs use 32 bit integers for everything.
The changes that are required to the interface to really achieve the goal that we were tasked with – to really make Drupal understandable to [non-tech users] has the consequence of making Drupal a less efficient and enjoyable place for Drupal developers to build cool stuff.The reason they got this reaction was not because devs are assholes, but because they (the UX designers) fundamentally misjudged the purpose of an open source project. In large part, it exists for devs to be able to work on stuff without the interference of clueless managers, marketers, sales people and other pointy-haired types, including UX designers, which I can sympathize with. So the goal of redesigning Drupal to make it easy to use for non-tech users runs counter to the reason for Drupal to exist at all, at least from the perspective of a large section of the developer community.
Programming is the literacy of software.That's a profoundly flawed analogy: programming is the literacy of creating software, perhaps. But pretending that the ability to write one's own software is essential is, at the end of the day, a profoundly egocentric vision carried around by -- coincidentally -- people who write software.
"Speaking about Mr. Jobs's assertion that Adobe is the No. 1 cause of Mac crashes, Mr. Narayan says if Adobe crashes Apple, that actually has something 'to do with the Apple operating system.'"An OS shouldn't crash, period. In fact, I don't think the figures reflect entire OS crash numbers, as opposed to application crashes. Apps crash every once in a while, that's just how it is. I can't remember the last time windows (Vista 64) crashed (meaning blue screened) on me. I think it's only happened only twice since I've built this machine.
Above is why both companies -- or at least their spokesleaders -- are fuckheads. There's a REAL WORLD that EXISTS. In it, apparently, Macs crash. Why?
Yeah, don't remind me. All our software that isn't Flash, is written in Java. It's all browser based and runs on servers with a Solaris version from 1994. I have tried to plant the rumor with Management that Oracle is planning to discontinue Java, now that it's bought Sun, but my rumor campaign doesn't seem to be taking hold.Bad programmers will produce bad code no matter what language it's written in. Good programmers will produce good code regardless of language, but probably won't waste their time with COBOL or Visual Basic, or whatever.
A couple of hotshot kids with fresh CompSci degrees could rewrite everything we run in a month or two in some modern language, hell it would be more stable even in PHP, ferchrissakes.
i'd rather not deal with that shit. and as a user, i just want the phone to work when i turn it on. and my iphone has worked every time i've turned it on. it does all the stuff apple told me it would do, and some stuff apple didn't tell me it would do.So has my android phone! And my PC! (And all my previous PCs, for the most part)
To take your chef analogy about steaks, the chefs are making steak (for free) to impress each other, or to advance state of the art steakcraft. If left to their own devices, chefs will make things that impress chefs.That's absolutely correct. As one of those chefs cooking to impress other chefs, I know how that goes. However (and this is where it gets important) it's impossible to deny that the number of 'diners' is much larger than the number of 'chefs.' If you actually don't care whether anyone else eats your steak that system works fine. Once most open source projects make it over the initial hurdle of recognition and success, though, they start getting seduced by comparisons and competition and beating the closed source alternative. And that's where things get tangly. Because if you are trying to grow, or compete, you are not building something exclusively for your own satisfaction anymore.
You shouldn't expect the "open cooking movement" to hand you a steak done to your specifications for free.As advocates of open systems, though, we can't have our cake and eat it too. We can't berate people for not caring about openness, then tell them 'Do it yourself' when they talk about what their pain points and priorities are. 'Openess' is a feature that we happen to value highly. If most people outside of the active internet commentariat don't care about that, that means we are a niche -- not that everyone else is foolish.
Watching two proprietary software companies deeply opposed to computer user freedom lob accusations back and forth about who is more opposed to freedom has been surreal, to say the least. But what's been crystal clear is that the freedom these companies are arguing about is their own, not that of their users. And what they are calling freedom isn't freedom at all—it is the ability to control those users. Adobe is mad at Apple for not letting Adobe control iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users via Flash, and Apple is mad at Adobe for suggesting that Apple is arbitrarily abusing its control over Application Store users...posted by tybeet at 8:25 AM on May 2, 2010 [2 favorites]
What's strangely absent from "Thoughts on Flash" is any explanation for why proprietary technology on the Web is bad, or why free standards are good...
If he had said anything about why user freedom on the Web is important, his hypocrisy would have been explicit. In a nutshell, he says, "Don't use Adobe's proprietary platform to engage with information on the Web. Use Apple's." He doesn't want users to freely wander and creatively explore the Web or their own computers; he wants them to move from the fenced-off "Freedom Zone" based in San Jose to the one based in Cupertino...
The definition of proprietary software is software which restricts users' freedoms to view its source code, run it for any purpose, share it, or modify it... Looking at the EULAs for Apple and Adobe, we can see that they look pretty much the same, and that "iPhone OS" and "Apple" could be substituted for "Adobe" and "Flash" in Jobs's own quote. His implicit admission of this, that "Apple has many proprietary products too," is a comical understatement...
Jobs has hit the nail on the head when describing the problems with Adobe, but not until after smashing his own thumb. Every criticism he makes of Adobe's proprietary approach applies equally to Apple, and every benefit attributed to the App Store can be had without it being a mandatory proprietary arrangement. Apple can offer quality control and editorial selection over available free software, and encourage users to exclusively—but voluntarily—use their store. Instead, Apple chooses to enforce legal restrictions, the transgression of which is punishable by criminal law, on users who want to make changes to their own computers, like installing free, non-Apple, software...
So, the correct decision in the dispute between Apple and Adobe is "none of the above." The past we need to leave behind is not just Flash, it's Apple's proprietary software as well. There is plenty of room for them to join us along with everyone else in the free world—but they must stop pretending that their little cages are the free world.
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).Does this mean that those multiple languages can be used to create Apps and developers don't have to use Xcode?
#ifdef DEBUG #define DLog(...) NSLog(__VA_ARGS__) #else #define DLog(...) /* */ #endif #define ALog(...) NSLog(__VA_ARGS__)Even though this define statement has its own "syntax", this isn't creating an API because it gets translated directly into Objective-C or C instructions. This doesn't violate any of Apple's guidelines because I am using Xcode to ultimately translate a macro into a call to an Objective-C class (NSLog), if a DEBUG compile-time flag is set.
int max(a,b) { return a >= b ? a : b; } #define max(a,b) (a >= b ? a : b; )s/max\([^,]+,[^)]+\)/(a >= b ? a : b; )/cpp emit C tokens to be consumed by gcc and having Perl or Scheme or Lua emit those C tokens. But the last part of that conceptual continuum is forbidden by the 3.3.1 license, and it's this line drawn across these several closely coupled concepts that I find most crazy about the restrictions. Particularly because in the end everything gets turned into code compiled by the same toolchain.Drew [ARM VP marketing] suggested that solving the issue of Flash optimisation had involved "lots of heavy lifting" but once the new version of Adobe's rich media software is in place for smartbooks, that would be "very powerful" for ARM....However, Drew said he was "far from disappointed" with ARM's smartbook development experience thus far. "I actually think we're a lot stronger because of it," he said. "We now know what we didn't know two years ago. It has taught us a lot about how we work with software companies."posted by bonehead at 9:31 AM on May 6, 2010
I think I have to dispute how much of the success of the iPad is the result of Apple. In fact, I believe that the iPad is a success despite of Apple, not because of it.How on earth does someone even write that? Does any of that even make sense?
... These programs and numerous others that users love on the iPad could have been published on the Windows (or other) platform had there been the initiative to do so and if Microsoft had been able to convince developers to change their way of thinking about touchscreen applications. The programs that ran on Windows needed an interface switch that developers seemed unable to do without insistence. Insistence that they apparently got from Apple.
So much for leaving in droves.
"No more IT track, few scheduled Mac sessions, and it was only announced six weeks ahead of time. And it sold out in record time.
Last year’s took a month to sell out. This year’s took eight days."
[source]
cpp #defines, but instead, it was a custom preprocessor that Stroustrup wrote from scratch in C. He didn't use the term compiler because he was essentially only doing token translation. Though I still think it's pretty interesting (and relevant to discussion of the new 3.3.1 restrictions) that he bootstrapped a language that didn't have the semantics of classes embedded into one that did with only token translation.Personally, I hope Adobe gets Flash working well on Android soon. Flash is still one of the greatest tools we as web developers have, and the idea that HTML5 can do everything that Flash can do and thus renders Flash irrelevant is completely inaccurate — patently absurd, in fact.posted by mullingitover at 1:20 PM on May 9, 2010 [2 favorites]
All this coming out on the same day as the news of another Foxconn employee “suicide”… ( http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-05/12/content_9840667.htm ). Yes, TC, this is all getting quite “silly” indeed.And the backstory?
There seems to be little new information posted, though the individual who submitted the link to us stated a Vietnamese businessman had bought it in the U.S. together with an iPad.WTF?
Stallman's vision for the future of computing is very open, and Apple's vision for the future of computing is very closed.Actually, I'd argue that Apple's vision for its future (not computing in general) is very 'we will absolutely control our platform and not be reliant on 3rd parties to advance it'. Calling Apple very closed when it supports HTML5, an open standard, is short sighted.
How am I supposed to make an HTML5 app that works in IE6?If "being able to forget IE6" is the measure of living in 2015, when do you think you'll be living in 2015? Google is already there. I ask this with full respect for the difficulty of what you're dealing with.
[snip]
But I l[i]ve on planet Earth. I live in 2010, not 2015.
Until now, nearly all the folks who have expressed an opinion about the weighty matter of Apple's refusal to allow Adobe's Flash onto the iPhone (including me) have had one thing in common: They've never used Flash on any smartphone...posted by mazola at 5:21 PM on May 24, 2010
The beta is, indeed a beta, and the EVO hasn't even shipped yet. But I started this experiment wanting to like Flash on Android...and as of right now, my hands-on experience with it has left me profoundly disappointed.
"I don't have a Constitutional right to an iPhone application, but they don't have a right to keep me from talking."posted by mazola at 6:50 AM on May 26, 2010
Legalities aside, I asked David if he thinks it's right for Apple to filter political apps. He said, "The way I look at it, iPhone applications are becoming somewhat of a de facto standard. Similar to the way Hare Krishnas are allowed to give out flowers and literature at the airport, even if the airport is privately run in partnership with the public, with the iPhone becoming the standard for mobile applications, it is wrong for them to stifle expression of certain ideas with the world through the portal."
« Older Bali's "Kuta Cowboys" get unwanted atten... | How I Met Your Motherboard... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by mazola at 7:16 AM on April 29, 2010 [5 favorites]