Apple's iPhone 4 SDK license bans Flash, Java, Mono apps - Page 5

Get your Government agency to purchase an Enterprise dev license. As the developer for their enterprise, you can deliver whatever they want to them without having to put it on the App store. You get to end run the whole set of App store restrictions because it is a private in-house only distribution.

You are still playing by the rules, this is why things like the Enterprise dev license exists.

Adobe needs Apple a LOT more than Apple needs Adobe.

Adobe is lucky Steve lets them put any of their products on his computers.

Now you are just being silly. A large portion of the Macs sold go to creative professionals who use Adobe products. Why would Steve want to sell less product? CEOs should not get their undies in a bunch, it is not good for the shareholders. Lately APPL is doing fine despite Steve's eccentricities, but for how much longer?

In general.

The inexorable push of development thought where it touches the need for real security. Crap, it was't 8 hours after I posted before that Apple announces Webkit2 with per-process sandboxes. We already have OS X iPhone sandboxes and Google is trying to turn the sandboxed Chrome into an OS.

Also just follow the interesting papers and who hires those postdocs and newly minted PhDs.

I understand the argument that Apple doesn't want half baked crap coming to the iPhone but having to only use their flavor of C makes no sense to me. I agree with a previous commenter that it should be possible to compile the code so that Apple couldn't tell. I believe that a great programmer would much rather spend their time writing apps that could be used on as many devices as possible. This move by Apple is primarily a shot across the bow of Google because they are the only real competition Apple has in the mobile market.

And how many of those 85,000 are shovelware or just copies of a million other apps on the appstore?

Yeah, a bigger pile of crap is always... more crap

So that would apply to the Android market as well?

Well that's all a little different from Adobe punishing Apple by messing with the CS apps. Photoshop and Illustrator dwarf the After Effects user base, and in those markets Macs are heavily entrenched.

I agree that Apple could and should do more for the pro film and audio markets, but that's not really Adobe's stronghold (outside of AE). Running Avid on PCs doesn't have any bearing on that one way or the other, and FCP seems to be doing fine, as far as I know. Is Premier making some kind of a comeback?

Programs written in assembler are usually blazing fast and extremely efficient. That much is true.

What I don't know is how many programmers actually still know how to do it. I've dabbled in it (although I am by no means highly proficient, and my experience is with x86 assembly) because I was curious. I really wonder if the majority of programmers (the ones that would write 90% of applications) know any assembly language in this day and age of high level start-to-finish development environments. Outside of the people who program microcontrollers for embedded applications, I have a feeling that almost any assembly language programmer is something of a rarity.

Apple does have one very good reason--and it is the big tradeoff for every gain you get as a result of programming in assembly language--not to make everyone program in assembly. Doing so could make any switch in CPUs very difficult to pull off. ARM is the nearly undisputed leader in power consumption vs. performance now, yet nobody knows for sure how long that will be true. Intel's Atom needs work but is not a bad chip. (Compare a D945GCLF board to the new D410PT/D510M0 to see how far they've come in terms of heat output alone.)

I suppose there is always the "Rosetta approach" but I don't know how well it would work on a device where battery life is the big selling and design point.

Not true. Sega v. Accolade.


Good points all. Yes, Apple would never want assembly to be the standard because it would then be impossible to change architectures. Rosetta at least makes it possible, although I doubt Apple much cares for using it again now that IBM owns it. And having everything be as easy as a recompile makes it easy.

Re: Overdone - Not at all. One of the most popular software development IDEs is written in Java: Eclipse. That said, it's true that desktop applications (Win or Mac) written in Java are few and far between. But desktop apps are only a small part of the picture. Try to find an enterprise web development shop in Silicon Valley that doesn't use Java to do the heavy lifting on the server-side. The upshot is this: it's highly unlikely that Apple would ever limit software development for Macs to a single language or family of languages.

Re: iPhone apps written in Flash and packaged using Adobe PFI - the two most popular I'm aware of are Chroma Circuit and Alchemist. I believe Chroma Circuit was an Apple Top 10 pick at one point.

Re: Bias - I've been a engineer for over 10 years - written software in C, C++, Java, Perl, VB, and, yes, Flash, Flex, and AIR using everything from VI to Visual Studio, Eclipse, and Flash Pro. The Flash IDE is unique in how it facilitates development of animated applications. I was delighted the first time I built a Flash trivia game and had questions flying around the screen controlled by an OO language (AS3). Would I have built the J2EE enterprise sales application I worked on at my previous job in Flash? Of course not. But for small, animated games and gadgets, Flash is perfect. For someone with little design experience, Flash opened up a world of animation possibilities for me. It let me do in hours what would have taken days in other development environments. It's fun. If you haven't tried it, you should.

And yes, there are thousands of would-be developers out there who write sloppy and sluggish Flash/AS3 code. The same is true for Java, C++, Perl, and Objective C. That said, there are also plenty of strong Flash/AS3 developers who know what they're doing and build apps like Chroma Circuit that are beautiful, fun, and perform really well. I have it on my iPod Touch and it's totally additive.

The point is this: Let developers do what they're good at and consumers will win. Stifle development and creativity by limiting developer options and everyone loses. ABSOLUTELY - Apple SHOULD be the gate-keeper for controlling the quality of apps on their products. There's just no correlation between the goal of quality control and the tools or languages people use to build apps with.

Different issues, not applicable case law.

Care to elaborate?

I'm just saying there seems a world of difference between ruling out apps originally written in Flash or Silverlight, compared to developers using standards such as Javascript, CSS and HTML in tools such as Phonegap, Titanium and Unity.

Surely if these tools can export code that is compliant with Apple's iPhone OS 4.0 requirements, then they can live on - and allow developers with non-Objective-C programming experience the opportunity to publish to the app store. But if Apple then introduces an unnecessary mechanism to require native SDK use, then the restraint of trade issues might have more validity.

It seems a bit like a supermarket saying, "we will only sell the carrots from farmer X in our store if they used fertilizer Y to grow them".

The solution?

The SDK/Developers licence has to become FREE.

I like it; sounds more like ActiveX

You've got that backwards. Remember about what, ten years ago or whatever, when Avid said they'd stop developing for the Mac? They faced a customer revolt that forced them to change their position in a heartbeat.

Something like half of Adobe's Creative Suite sales are the Mac version. (This was said publicly by an Adobe employee not long ago, but I'm failing to google it up right now.) Adobe needs the Mac more than Apple needs Flash developers to release apps for the iPhone. It's simple maths.

Actually, yeah, it seems to be. I don't use it myself, so I can't comment, but the industry buzz for Premiere CS5 is quite good. But it's still a bit of a walled garden, unfortunately.

Avid is Avid, and as long as they don't fall completely out of their chairs, they're going to maintain their market position for the foreseeable future. Final Cut's core strength in commercial post (in addition to being less than half the price of MC Soft) is XML: it's not perfect, but it's generally far easier to interoperate with other systems through XML than through EDL.

Premiere has neither the already-strong market position nor the interoperability with anything other than the other Adobe apps. "Lookit! You can link After Effects comps and Premiere timelines together!" Great. But what about sending a Premiere timeline to Smoke for conforming and finishing? Hello? Hello, Adobe, are you there?

With Premiere Adobe seems to be doing one of two things. Either they're really aggressively going after what I call the "wedding videographer" market one-man operations on the very low end of the professional spectrum or they're trying to move into commercial post but just doing it really poorly. Not sure which.

It makes sense that a not ruinously expensive and reasonably capable edit package for the PC would make some headway, particularly now that relatively cheap PC hardware is capable of running same at a decent clip. Premiere costs what, about half of what Vegas goes for? As you say, for the wedding videographer market it's a natural, particularly since such operations are likely to already be running at least Photoshop. Adobe has been pretty aggressive with leveraging their package deals to get you to treat their various CS offerings as virtually all one thing.

The barriers for entry into commercial post are pretty high at this point-- similar to what Photoshop rivals face in the commercial image editing market. FCP is firmly established as the "other" pro level solution after Avid, all though of course a few other NLEs have their enthusiasts. Since hardware costs aren't really an issue when setting up pro-level editing suites, Premiere would have to be doing something amazing to make much headway, IMO.

Even so, Apple needs to keep on it. FCP is overdue for an overhaul, and I think there is at least the perception that the pro video apps aren't getting much love. What ever happened to mythical Shake rewrite?

The notion that this protects the iPhone from low quality apps is without merit. Their license agreement already enables them to deny apps on these grounds.

What this lets Apple do is deny an app that would otherwise meet their standards only on the grounds of what tools and techniques were used to develop it.

This isn't good for users or developers.

As an independent developer, I'm now forced out of the iPhone market. There are many more like me, and thousands of existing games in the app store in violation of this license.

"Forced out" in the sense that you can't or won't take the trouble to learn the native tools?

I can't afford to roll back two months of development and start from scratch.

For me the worst part of this news is that it means no MAME emulator for iPhone or iPad, ever.

Yes, I know this was an April Fool's Joke, but I want one!



Credit

So you're abandoning developing for the mobile space altogether? Or just whatever app you had cooking for the iPhone/iPad?

I was going to target iPhone-iPad/Android/Facebook, so my Android plans are unaffected.

Any future plans to support iPhone OS are uncertain.

Understood.

Apple is completely stifling innovation on this move.

http://unity3d.com/ can't use the iPhone? Come on!!!

Apple has suffered from Hubris in the past but this is really tyranny. Apple is EVIL!

The best programmers are already using the best software for the IPad. Sorry you backed the wrong horse.

Because the future of Apple is in Mobile Devices. Apple will never work in the past. Instead, they create the future.

Those markets are dwarfed by the consumer market. Apple cannot be in every market. They choose to put resources where they yield the highest return.

Let me try to help you understand me.

I know a small bit about technology and it's history. I know what a geek is and I'm sympathetic for them, most of the time.

Since 10 years I'm using a Mac. I check Windows and Linuxes (what's the correct plural?) from time to time in a virtual machine. I'm happy that I've changed to the Mac and I see nothing at the moment which would make me switch back.

If Apple would be run by geeks, I wouldn't have changed to the Mac because there wouldn't be a difference for me, as a non-geek-user, to a Windows box. Obviously, it must have something to do with Steve Jobs.

Ergo: if in doubt, I stay on Steve's side and watch how more and more information comes in (thank you, Gruber and Dilger and all the others) and try to understand it. And you know what? I always agree with Steve If somebody is right 10 years (I'm not closely following Apple for a longer time), that's an excellent track record.

For me, the Mac works. For me, my iPods worked. For me, my iPhone worked (sold it 1 month ago to buy an Android-Phone for the time until the next iPhone will be available contractless here in Europe). My Android-Phone doesn't work as it should.

Do I have to write more?



Cheers,
j.

For the most part I agree with Gruber and the guy who wrote this.
http://www.devwhy.com/blog/2010/4/12...framework.html
That said, I really don't care to run Flash. I'm just fine without it.

Well.. Seems like a lot of Top list apple games are no longer eligible for AppStore..
Care to still claim that using engines and code interpreting creates BAD games and that this change is only good for the iPhone and iPad?

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?...zV1hwVnc&hl=en

I find at least Monkey Island, Angry Birds, Zombieville USA. None of will fulfill the new rules.

You obviously don't realize that "engines and code interpreting" aren't outlawed by this latest license terms update.

Engines such as physics engines will already be written in C++ or C, it is the drastic oddity to find one written in something else. So that code is okey doke. Anyway engines as you are using the term are just libraries, not OS APIs so they weren't even part of the conversation to start with.

Interpretation and Just In Time compilation have been verboten on iPhone since the first dev kit betas. Nothing new there, them's been the rules for two years now.

Most of the rest of "translated or cross compiled" into iPhone Apps has a little bit of interpretation to it. If a developer uses code generation to create an Objective-C file, and repeats to generate a fully formed Xcode project which is then built within Xcode that isn't code translation into an iPhone app. This plus library calls is what the majority of those game developers use. There are a few other capabilities which will need tweaking to line up with the new terms, but that's why stuff like this gets announced in the beta. It gives the devs a few months to tweak what's necessary, but still locks the system terms against what it is really aimed at.

Uhm.. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to open this up for me a little bit. Didn't understand at all, what best software?

Well, sorry to say, but the only thing you successfully communicated here is your blind religious Steve fanboyism.

Alright, I chose my words wrong, with engines, I perhaps mean more "platforms", such as Unity3D.


Yes, but as far as I understood, scripting languages are forbidden as well, which would make, for example Monkey Island forbidden. If you have written games, well, ever, you would know that scripting makes things easier and more practical.


The agreement says that it has to be written originally in Objective-C, you can't make it java first and run it through a code converter. Apple would never know, but you've still broken the agreement.

Well, nobody knows if Unity is allowed until something official is given. But believe me, if you have almost finished a project on Unity, you cannot convert it to native code in a few months, especially most of these people work alone or in very small groups.

Yes, this is an immense pain today as a result. On the other hand we're starting to see ObjC ports to Android (http://code.google.com/p/android-gcc-objc2-0/) and ObjC kinda sorta works on Linux and Windows and with gnuStep you even get some of the core libraries.

And of course, you can always use C++ or C. Write your core logic (model) in C/C++ and then your view/controller in the target platform language for Android and iPhone.

The issue is with managed langages like Java and C#. Looking at the Java to iPhone solutions it didn't look like a viable government solution given that the code is recompiled on foreign servers. Flexycore and the other one (that the big game devs use) do this.

MonoTouch looked good...until this. On the other hand it's Novell backed. Um, okay. And the future of Java in anything other than J2EE is suspect now that Oracle has it. While Android is Java it isn't J2ME.

I honestly don't see a bulletproof solution moving forward regardless of Apple's new rules. It's just a shame as I can't stand C/C++ anymore after a decade of Java and C#.

Maybe ObjC across all platforms is the lesser of the three evils. It'll depend on how usable the core language will be without libraries. I do like the message passing architecture even if I dislike the syntax. I REALLY am going to miss the Call Hierachy from eclipse though.

That's low and imature.
Very disappointing Apple.